New Music Report – June 4, 2021

Last week was a fairly light week for new albums, but man was it a cool week for singles. Even on these slow weeks, there’s been so much cool new music coming out that has been a lot of fun to talk about. Specifically, the new The Air I Breathe and the new Memphis May Fire singles were both on repeat for a long time. And both were complete surprises. We haven’t seen new music from TAIB in a decade, and Memphis May Fire hasn’t made good music in just about as long, but here we are, 2021 is full of surprises.

Red Fang – The problem with metal, well, one of them anyway, is that most metal bands take themselves way too seriously. Even the ones that have a bit of fun with it still have the super serious tough guy promo pics and everything, it gets a bit tiresome and one dimensional. Red Fang have never been like that. You could always tell that they were enjoying the hell out of themselves and their music. Because of that, their super lofi stoner/doom metal never really stood out aside from some earlier works when it was still fresh. Since then, it’s just been a very good and very consistent history of really fun metal made by a bunch of really fun aging, stoned metalheads. And Arrows is no different, as it turns out. I will concede that it’s a bit of an evolution on their previous sound, as they mature and mellow out into even fuzzier and groovier riffs. But this isn’t going to challenge anyone’s perception of Red Fang, or stoner metal in general. It’s just a really fun, chunky, sludgey, riffy stoner album And sometimes, you really can’t ask for much more than that.

Singles/Albums – The Air I Breathe (Metalcore), Memphis May Fire (Metalcore, it’s actually decent this time),The Breathing Process (Blackened Deathcore), Darkthrone (Black Metal/Doom), Mayhem (Black Metal), Sleeping with Sirens (Post Hardcore), Descendants (Punk), King Woman (Doom Metal), Light the Torch (Metalcore), Death Goals (LP, Mathcore), Rise Against (LP, Punk), Atreyu (LP, Alt Rock), Capstan (Pop Punk/Alt Rock)