New Music Report – February 12, 2021
Another great week in new music. Still only a few releases at a time, but man these are good ones. Both incredibly deep albums but they accomplish the complexity in very different ways, it’s a very interesting comparison and both are fantastic albums. Also, I started this year by adding a section for singles to help everyone follow those since they come out more frequently and I’ve been really happy with that so far. So, this week I expanded on it a bit and added a little section for a few albums that I think are worth noting but don’t quite warrant a full review. I may finally have a good system down for this haha. Any feedback is welcome, of course.
God is an Astronaut – There are some bands out there that you know are guaranteed to put out a good album. God is an Astronaut is one of those bands. They may not be the household names like Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky, but they’ve been chugging away for just as long, constantly at the top of the game in the post rock genre. With certified classics like All is Violent, All is Bright, these guys have laid their claim to legendary status long ago. And this new album is another incredibly consistent, if not exactly career defining release in a very impressive discography. This album is more or less what we would expect from GIAA with a fairly complex soundscape with endless rich textures. Honestly, it doesn’t command your attention like All is Violent…, which of course makes it a very difficult album to digest in a single sitting. All throughout, however, there are heavy, dramatic, almost Russian Circles-esq moments that immediately standout and set the mood for the album. This is either perfect background music, or music worth digesting wholly, through a good pair of headphones while doing nothing else.
Humanity’s Last Breath – Good god, what a fucking album. About this time last year, Lorna Shore put out a new album, and despite the fact that we still had about 90% of the year left, I made a pretty bold claim that it was the heaviest album of the year. Sure enough, 11 months later, I hadn’t managed to prove myself wrong. Well, here we are again, and we’re barely halfway through February and I can fairly confidently say that this is going to be one of the heaviest albums of 2021. I guess it’s sort of cheating though, it’s not exactly a risky prophecy. Any blackened deathcore album is going to hit like a freight train with an uncompromised magnitude. There’s honestly just so much going on with this album, that it’s hard to corner it into a single genre of heavy music. It’s not just simple mosh pit, beatdown music, though it isn’t necessarily lacking in that either, but it’s so much more. It’s a deeply complex and jarring album, hitting like a horror movie, leaning into doom metal, post metal, black metal and more with a consistently brutal foundation of ripping deathcore. This album is phenomenal.
Singles/Other Albums – For Your Health (Mathcore, full length), Teenage Wrist (Post-hardcore/grunge, full length), Ice Nine Kills (Elvis cover), Architects (kinda metalcore), Tigers Jaw (Emo), Of Mice & Men (Metalcore), August Burns Red (Metalcore, b-side), Our Hollow Our Home (Metalcore), Cabal (Deathcore), Trash Boat (Pop punk), Reflections (Deathcore), The Drowned God (Sludge/black metal), Eternal Void (Metalcore), Patent Sixty Seven (Mathcore)