Apex Predator – Easy Meat

Apex Predator – Easy Meat came out on Century Media in January 2015; the label announced it for 27 January in North America and a day earlier everywhere else. Russ Russell recorded, engineered and mixed it at Parlour Studios in Kettering, England, where the work went on throughout 2014. Barney Greenway sang, Shane Embury played bass, Mitch Harris guitar and Danny Herrera drums, and Mitch Harris's vocals were recorded separately, at Studio Hostivař in Prague and at Griffin Studios in Las Vegas. Greenway traced the title and the whole concept to the Rana Plaza disaster of the year before, the collapse in 2013 of a building in Bangladesh that housed garment factories. It pushed him to make the album an exposure of slave labour as it survives today under other names, and of the conditions that keep it in place. In the title, the apex predator stands for those who impose that labour and profit from it, the easy meat for the people who feel they have no option but to comply. Frode Sylthe's cover imitates supermarket packaging, a plastic tray filled with the leftovers of meat production. There are fourteen songs, and the video for "Smash a Single Digit", directed by Michael Panduro, was built from 1,093 drawings made by hand in ink by Lisbet Fredslund, 225 of them of Greenway's face. The jewel-case CD (Century Media 9985192), with a 20-page booklet, and the download carried the fourteen songs. A 180-gram LP and a red cassette added "Critical Gluttonous Mass"; a limited mediabook CD added "What Is Past Is Prologue", "Oh So Pseudo" and a cover of G-Anx's "Clouds of Cancer / Victims of Ignorance"; and a digipak sold only in North America added "Oh So Pseudo". There was also a mail-order box limited to 1,000 copies. In the UK the album reached number 15 on the Official Rock & Metal Albums Chart and number 74 on the Official Physical Albums Chart.