THE FIRST 200 ORDERS OF THE WV RUN ARE SIGS, THE FOLLOWING 100 WILL BE HANDMADES. THIS IS DETERMINED BY ORDER NUMBER.
It’s 2025 and there are no signs of stopping! You thought WV was done??? Thought i’d just relax this year and not do a bunch of big bands and big drops?? You fool! In fact, let’s make the first drop of the year the biggest banger I can think of - It’s WELCOME TO SLUDGE CITY by literallyAnnotations Of An Autopsy!
Let me get this out of the way. Yes, I’m going to make you spend an eye-watering amount of money for a four song EP with a 12 minute runtime. And yeah, one of the songs is an “intro” lmao. Like just absolutely insane that an EP like this can have such far reaching, long lasting cultural impact. And yet, here we are. 2025 and like, if you were to ask every elder scene kid what the most formative EP of the early 2000s were, you’d unequivocally get Infinite Death, this, and like Chelsea Grin. Absolutely one of the tentpole EPs of the whole genre. So good that it doomed them to the same fate as like, JFAC. Deathcore so good that they could never make a commercially viable album again because dumbass scenesters wouldn’t let them shed this material and have more serious efforts, haha.
This EP has stood the test of time for a reason. It’s insane heavy and really introduced a ton of paradigms that would filter down in to like, every release post-sludge city. Effortlessly heavy, and self aware without being corny. Like, this is truly and EP that you listen to in your car with your buddies when you’re driving to the gym at night with the windows down. Just instantly transports me back to a point in time.
Thanks to Rising Merch for letting me run with this. If you’ve been following AOAA for the past decade, you’ll see that they;ve put out a new EP a few years ago, and have done hella runs of CD represses and repress after repress of tapes. So right out of the gate, please shut the fuck up about the no repress thing this time, lmao. They’ve had a long and fulfilling history of repressing this album on every medium a billion time for years! And its with that in mind that I approached the vinyl presentation of Sludge City.
I knew for this since Rising and the band have already reimagined the original art for their reissues that I wanted to go a new direction. I wanted to keep the hydrocephalus baby and the green - thats it! No sense doing another direct reimagining since they already did that! Why beat it in to the ground. I wanted to be a bit more literal and “welcome” them to “sludge city” (shoot me so cringe leave me alone). I liek to imagine that baby has escaped the tube and is now in the gutter in a world of sludge. I wanted something not-digital (again, digital has been done twice) and grounded in like, more sloppy and grimy illustration. My attempted to age up the EP a bit!
Audio was handled by Zach over at Third Eye Studios (as always) and he was really able to bring a ton out of the original recordings. No CD rips here! We were able to grab the original master exports and run with that. I think you’re goin to be shocked by how good they sound. Just the joy of a single sided 12’ - throw it on, jam this whole EP and like, just revel in it!
This one-time pressing is limited to 400 copies across 6 variants:
50 Sigtro (Wax Vessel Signature)
50 Welcome to Sig City (Wax Vessel Signature)
50 Sig Sig Gadget (Wax Vessel Signature)
50 Serpent (Wax Vessel Signature)
100 Sludge (Wax Vessel Handmade)
100 180g Natural PVC
All of this housed in:
1.5x thickness Matte single pocket jackets
Double sided, gatefold matte full color insert
Black polylined innersleeves
Gold foil numbering
Stuffed into polybags
Hype Sticker’d
Custom WV Mailers
Matching WV Album art sticker
Like I said, these are in hand and will be shipping immediately. Happy 2025, stay tuned for more! Another huge one after this, so I hoped you saved your Christmas money and I hope your new years resolution was to spend a billion dollars in January!
