That there’s light at the end of the tunnel is a cliché often rolled out to those going through a bad time. But what if that’s not true? What if the darkness of that tunnel just stretches on forever and there is no light, no salvation, no hope? Because those are the circumstances of We Are Alive Beyond Repair, the third full-length album from New Jersey’s Gatherers – sonically and lyrically, it’s a bleak, brutal, nihilistic record that’s shrouded in such despair and anguish that there’s no chance whatsoever for escape. And that’s just how the five-piece like it. “We wanted this album to be as ugly and as horribly truthful as possible,” explains vocalist Rich Weinberger. “It has this very human but flawed connotation to it. It’s very pessimistic. I was reading a lot of Sylvia Plath at the time we were writing this record and I just like that the fabric of our existence is very meek and it’s dull and, no matter what, nothing will ever get better. That was the angle I wanted to explore with this record. It’s the idea of being just being completely unfulfilled, that no matter how much time we put into this band it’ll never be self-fulfilling.”