Over half a decade on from the release of their debut album The Smothering Arms of Mercy, Melbourne post-traumatic prog-death outfit Growth have returned with Remember Me As Fire, their first new music since 2020.
The gap between releases has been deliberate….and necessary. Where The Smothering Arms of Mercy was written from within collapse, sickness and isolation, Remember Me As Fire exists in the far more uncomfortable space that follows: what happens when survival is no longer the question and you’re forced to confront who you are once the wreckage settles. In the bands own words, healing, is not gentle. It is an ugly process. Chaotic, disorienting and often more confronting than the pain that preceded it.
Growth began in 2017 as a reflective space for brothers Tristan Barnes (guitar/bass/artwork) and Nelson Barnes (drums), alongside vocalist LF, to explore trauma, mental illness and grief without romanticising them. They were later joined by Nick Rackham (bass) and Ben Boyle (guitar), cementing the bands line up. The project was never intended as catharsis for its own sake, but as a way to illustrate recovery in all its brutality. Not as linear progress, but as something fractured, cyclical and deeply human.
Remember Me As Fire begins precisely where Mercy ended. Written from the perspective of existing below rock bottom, the track explores the moment where self-erasure feels easier than self-awareness — and the violence required to step beyond that.
The line “I thought I had already fallen as far as I could go” is delivered with almost vile contempt, before giving way to a subtle shift in tone, a fragile, uneasy suggestion of possibility “a shadow with a dream to grasp the warmth of sunlight.”
“Remember Me As Fire” isn’t a demand for legacy, but a refusal to disappear quietly into the abyss. Fire in this context doesn’t equal triumph, but awareness. Painful, consuming and necessary.
The single marks the first step into Growth’s next chapter, one that interrogates the dignity we attach to suffering, the comfort of identifying solely with trauma, and the terrifying possibility that we might be more than the stories that have kept us alive.
Remember Me As Fire is available from January 21st via Wild Thing Records
