Attrition and Annie Hogan reissue WWI album ‘Millions of the Mouthless Dead’ digitally
Attrition’s Martin Bowes and Annie Hogan reissued their 2015 album “Millions of the Mouthless Dead” digitally on 15 August 2026, with all CDs sold out.
The album started with a shell that hit a British trench in Belgium in June 1917. Attrition founder Martin Bowes and pianist Annie Hogan reissued “Millions of the Mouthless Dead” digitally on 15 August 2026, eleven years after the darkwave and dark ambient collaboration first appeared. The 16-track record is on Hogan’s Bandcamp page and on the Attrition Bandcamp; every CD edition has sold out.
The story behind ‘Millions of the Mouthless Dead’
Bowes built the album around his grandfather William, a private with the West Yorks Regiment in the British Expeditionary Force. A German shell struck him in June 1917 while he was working on trench defences in Belgium. Canadian army medics carried him out, and he spent the rest of the war recovering from severe stomach wounds.
Bowes has explained that the title reaches past his own family:
“the millions on all sides that experienced the living hell that was the Europe of 1914-18.”
The music is credited to Bowes and Hogan together. Bowes handles readings and electronics; Hogan plays grand piano and keyboards and also reads, taking the opening “Into Cleaness, Leaping” and the closing “A Drawing Down Of Blinds”. The texts are original war poetry by Wilfred Owen, Adrien Bertrand, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ludwig Ganghofer, Kurt Tucholsky, Roland Leighton, Charles Sorley and Fenella Tillier. Alexander Nym, Peter Rainman and Karla Aelswitha contribute further readings. Nym also appears in Orgonautic, Drunkness and Gerechtigkeits Liga, and Rainman in People Theatre, Kick Burst and Waiting For Words.
The record’s centrepiece is a three-part sequence, “A Madman’s Flash”, running “As Quiet As”, “All The Mad Men” and “Krieg”. Wolfgang Flür, the former Kraftwerk percussionist, wrote and sang the lyrics on “Krieg”. Between those poles sit “Hammer Blow”, “Divine Providence”, “La Voie Sacree”, “The Blue Forest”, “Mincing Machine”, “The Bone Factory”, “The Third Light”, “Ghost Of Empire”, “Shell Shock”, “The Mouthless Dead” and “Heimatschluss”. Away from Kraftwerk, Flür has recorded as Yamo and Exxcelsior.
Side-Line covered the album on first release in Attrition releases World War I inspired ‘Millions of The Mouthless Dead’ album, and again later that year when the CD arrived through Ultra Mail Prod.
About Attrition
Martin Bowes and Julia Niblock formed Attrition in Coventry, England, in 1980, out of the same early-1980s British industrial and post-punk current as Coil, Test Department, In The Nursery and Portion Control. Bowes has run the project continuously since, through cassette-culture distribution, a long series of albums and his own Two Gods label, and he also masters records for other artists at his Cage studio.
The last few years have been productive ones. “The Black Maria” arrived in March 2024, announced in Attrition announces brand new album: ‘The Black Maria’ – Pre-orders available now, and Bowes discussed it at length in Click Interview with Attrition: ‘It Was High Time For Another Attrition Album!’. A remix companion followed in January 2025, covered in Attrition launches ‘A Permanent View? Black Maria Remixed’ exclusively on Bandcamp – Out now. On 31 October 2025 Bowes released “We Shall Share”, the debut EP by Klaendestine, his side project with longtime Attrition member Julia Waller and French coldwave musician Usher San.
About Annie Hogan
Annie Hogan is a British musician, producer, composer and DJ, born in 1961. She came to notice through her work with Marc Almond, playing piano in Marc and the Mambas and continuing as a collaborator across his solo career, and has since recorded with a wide range of artists. Her most recent album, “Tongues In My Head”, came out on 6 February 2026 through Downwards Records. “Millions of the Mouthless Dead” remains her only full-length collaboration with Attrition.
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