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)
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New Music Report – February 5, 2021
Really getting into some good new releases in 2021 so far. One trend I’m noticing so far though, is a lot of surprise releases. I think I’ve seen more surprise releases so far in 2021 than the entire year last year, including two this week (Hayley Williams and Loathe). And I suppose that can be chocked up to artists making music outside of their normal album cycles due to the shutdown, but whatever the reason, it’s lead to some really cool, creative albums that we definitely wouldn’t have heard otherwise, so if that’s the one positive thing to come from all this, I’ll take it.
Loathe – If you’re unfamiliar with Loathe, they were the band that topped my Album of the Year 2020 list. They’re an absolutely sensational new band from the UK that makes, well, the best way to describe it is Deftones-core. And the fact that they put out my favorite album of 2020 only raises further questions, like how did they manage to come up with another album so quickly? Well, the answer may upset a few people. As a caveat, this album was released with little notice and little marketing, but naturally fans were going to get excited. This is not exactly a full album, in reality, it’s an ambient album filled with absolutely brilliant, beautiful soundscapes. That “Deftones-esq” aspect of their sound requires a very strong ambient foundation to create the mood of the music. And this album focuses entirely on the details that you may miss when listening to the band as a whole. Being a fan of ambient in the first place, I absolutely love it, and I encourage Loathe fans to check it out, if only to hear some of the most important yet overlooked parts that makes this band so special in the first place.
Cult of Luna – Cult of Luna is another all-time favorite band of mine; I’m actually wearing my Cult of Luna hoodie as I write this. Speaking of album of the year lists, Cult of Luna was very near the top of my AoTY 2019 list with the remarkable A Dawn to Fear. It marked an even larger, more polished, and heavier direction for Cult of Luna, and I think it can certainly be argued that it was their best album yet. This new EP is intended to be sort of a transitionary piece, from the sound of A Dawn to Fear as a segue into their continued progression of their sound on the next full length. And just the concept of that alone is incredibly captivating. It not only wraps up the current phase of the band but leads the way for speculation on what we may be able to expect next, all while being a wonderful standalone piece of music regardless of broader impacts. Truthfully, it feels more like a B-side to A Dawn to Fear rather than a clear path forward, or even a bridge, but I’d hardly say that’s a complaint. It’s another excellent installment in Cult of Luna’s discography that has me excited for the future of the band.
Flowers for Vases/Hayley Williams – Now to get this out of the way, I love Hayley Williams so much. I’m not really a huge Paramore fan, if I’m honest, but Williams is an excellent musician with a very interesting and unique yet incredible accessible style of songwriting, and it’s always fun to follow her progression and new projects. She put out a solo album last year under the moniker Petals for Armor, and this seems to be a complimentary/juxtaposed release to that. Petals for Armor had a more abstract and experimental yet dance-y vibe, while this album is MUCH more sedate and melancholy, and so naturally, I love this album so much. This is probably my favorite release of her entire back catalog. It’s a fairly simple, lightweight album, but the execution and careful songwriting is stellar. Her voice is somehow both gentle and incredibly powerful over the carefully composed and sparse, yet beautiful melodies. Overall, it’s a gorgeous record with a new perspective on a wonderful musician, and I’m a huge fan.
Singles – Every Time I Die (the GOAT), Erra (AOTY-tier Metalcore, trending kinda numetalcore), The Armed (Noise Punk?), Signs of the Swarm (Deathcore), Cannibal Corpse (Death Metal), Sentinels (Metalcore), Death From Above 1979 (Indie), Julien Baker (Indie/Singer Songwriter), Tetrarch (Numetalcore), Thousand Below (Post Hardcore), EyeHateGod (Sludge Metal), Void of Vision (Metalcore), Earth Groans (Metalcore/Deftones cover), VCTMS (Numetalcore)
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New Music Report – January 29, 2021
Eclectic mix of new music this week. I’d say there’s something for everybody here but that isn’t necessarily true. All of these albums are fantastic but, aside from perhaps Lucero, cater to very niche audiences. If you’re looking for something that’s a bit of a challenge to listen to but with incredibly rewarding results, then this week is for you.
Lucero – Back in 2008/09 there was a very strong, very niche hype around a specific type of americana-tinged folk punk, influenced mostly by The Gaslight Anthem’s ’59 Sound, of course. And I fell VERY deep down that rabbit hole. And Memphis-based country punk band, Lucero, is one of the best things I have to show for it. This band will always have a special place in my heart, especially their earlier albums, the ones that sound like they were recorded in a buddy’s garage with a single microphone. They had a soulful, authentic, simplistic charm that just created this grand ideal of a time and place that probably never existed outside of their albums. Their past few albums evolved beyond that, leaning hard into the soul aspect of their style, adding horn sections, gospel choirs, and other elaborate arrangements, it lost a little of what I fell in love with, but it was undeniably good. The newest album, changes up the formula again, adding some synths and evolving past a gritty, down home punk band, into something that more closely resembles classic rock. But the charm, the honesty, the grand, yet smooth execution that are all part of Lucero’s charm are back, stronger than ever.
The Body – Man, I don’t even know what to tell you this album even is. At its core, people say The Body is a doom metal band, or at least derives from one. But that doesn’t even begin to tell the story, they take the bass-driven droning sound of doom and absolutely mutilate it into some avant garde, post-everything shitshow that’s absolutely brilliant. It sounds like a 40-minute long car crash. An onslaught of throbbing, compressed bass that strains your ear drums laying the foundation for incessant clanging, crashing, and metal deforming and twisting beyond any conceptual recognition of where this sound might have come from. All this interspersed with distorted, indecipherable, desperate shrieks. And the result, I mean, Jesus, what a record. It’s entirely unique in its execution. It sounded exactly like how I described it. It doesn’t sound like an album, it sounds like an accident, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. It’s not something I’m going to listen to all the time, it’s too abstract and frankly exhausting to listen to very frequently. But the experience itself was incredibly exciting.
Portrayal of Guilt – This album was a really cool surprise, in the past year and half, Portrayal of Guilt have put out three EPs, so I wasn’t really expecting them to have a full length ready so soon, but I guess with the quarantine going on, there isn’t much else for a band to do than make new music. These guys have been absolutely on fire, built up with tons of underground hype ever since the release of their debut full length just 2 years ago, earning themselves comparisons to absolutely legendary bands like Converge along the way. They’ve been dubbed one of the leaders of the screamo revival movement by everyone from NPR to The Washington Post, curiously enough. And I guess screamo is somewhat accurate but that REALLY doesn’t tell the whole story. Their sound is pure chaos, with a foundation of very clear screamo influences from bands like Pg.99 mixed with everything from noise punk to straight up hardcore. Add to that some howling vocals reminiscent of black metal. The result is an incredibly unique testament to the diversity and brutality of heavy music and a truly inspiring listen.
Singles – The ’68 (post-The Chariot Josh Scogin), Long Distance Calling (German post-metal), Devil Sold His Soul (post metal/screamo), Chelsea Wolfe & Emma Ruth Rundle (Everything I’ve ever been waiting for), Left to Suffer (metalcore/deathcore),
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New Music Report – January 22, 2021
I’m actually kinda of shocked with how much great new music is coming out already. Usually, January is a bit of a wasteland, but we’ve got some really cool stuff going on already. I think a lot of it is maybe anticipation; bands hoping to work back to some sort of normalcy at some point this year. Fingers crossed on that, but I’m very much enjoying the new music in the meantime.
Ellende EP – I know atmospheric black metal is a touchy subject for a lot of people. It absolutely blew up a handful of years ago thanks to bands like Deafheaven and Alcest, and since then it has spawned and absolutely endless pretenders and half-baked solo projects masquerading around as atmospheric black metal by musicians that can’t write melodies and don’t have proper recording equipment. But every once in a while, a band comes along that complete makes up for all the disappointment out there and raises the bar even higher for the genre as a whole. Ellende have been raising that bar for years, and this new EP is an even greater step forward. They deliver a remarkably complex, deep, and haunting mixture of the brutal and the ethereal, with crushing blast beats and echoey, pained black metal vocals juxtaposed against beautiful clean, post-rock inspired sections while absolutely never losing momentum. This is an incredibly strong, emotional, and gorgeous album that shows exactly what all the hype in the genre is about and what this sound is really capable of.
April Rain – This week is packed full of fairly obscure hits and honestly, I’m pretty happy about that. Post rock in particular is filled with so many hidden gems all over the world. I think one of the coolest things about post rock is that there is no language barrier. Most of it is instrumental, so the language is in the music; the music itself tells a story, conveys emotion, and is able to fluently converse with the listener no matter what language they speak, and I think that’s a fairly unique phenomenon with post rock. April Rain is a perfect example, this is a band from St. Petersburg, Russia, a band that I otherwise likely would have had zero connection with, but now, I can feel everything they felt as they wrote this music, and the result is a really beautiful experience. There’s so much depth and feeling to this fairly laid back yet incredibly gorgeous album. It’s not terribly complex, it isn’t rewriting the book on post rock and it isn’t an entirely unique spin on the genre, but it is a very, very enjoyable listen and an exemplary take on what good post rock sounds like.
Tr1rt3en – I generally don’t take requests for these posts. I write about music that interests me, and that I personally want to write about. That said, there are a few people out there I’ll break that rule for. This was one of those recommendations. Which is always fun cause I really am starting with a blank slate. And man, I’m not sure what my preconceived notions were going to this album, but this was a hell of an experience. Th1rt3en is a project by semi-obscure but long-running rapper, Pharaohe Monch, along with a live band. Pharoahe Monch has had a career spanning three decades, with a sparse but very high quality discography, and this new album is a sharp left-turn yet still relevant elaboration on his musically intelligent and thematically complex back catalog. And what a left turn it is, it’s actually quite ambitious writing a thoughtful rap-rock album and not have it sound like a limp bizkit-esq abomination. But I feel like the point is to create polarizing opinions on this one, but It’s incredibly thought provoking and deep. I was very pleasantly surprised by this album and is just further proof that sometimes it’s nice to step out of your comfort zone and listen to something new.
Everyone Dies in Utah EP – Yeah, ok so, I was kinda looking forward to this one. Everyone Dies in Utah is a semi-classic name in the metalcore scene, and there’s always a bit of a nostalgic wave that I get when one of those 2010 era metalcore bands comes back to the surface to do something again. Lower Definition has new music coming out, I’m super excited about that, Attack Attack! put out new music which is pretty neat, Like Moths to Flames had a great comeback. But man… This isn’t great haha. Maybe the rose tinted glasses didn’t hold up as well as I’d hoped, of many this just isn’t that great. See, it’s got all the pieces of something that could be a good album but it feels… Unfinished. Like, it’s got some cool structuring, great melodies, some of the vocals are pretty good but when you put it all together it still feels like about 60% of it is missing. This sounds like demos or pre-production takes to get ideas down for an album, rather than the finished piece. Oh well, it was worth a listen I suppose. Hopefully the new Lower Definition is way better.
Singles – August Burns Red (THE metalcore), Architects (Used to be ABR-tier metalcore, now dad metal but still good), Panopticon (atmospheric black metal), Bad Religion (punk)
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New Music Report – January 15, 2021
My new music posts are back for 2021! The start of the year was super slow, but it turns out a lot happened all at once, we have a few surprise albums, a ton of new singles, and a lot of exciting news about upcoming releases. Also, I have to be honest here for a second, the main website I used as my source for upcoming releases shut down as of January 1st, so that was quite stressful, but I’m back up and running, so these will continue as scheduled. Thank you all for joining me again, I’m looking forward to a ton of great new music for 2021.
Terminal Bliss EP – We’re starting the year off with an absolute ripper. This is a 10 song EP (I guess it counts as an EP?) that’s only 10 minutes long. This RVA band features members of Pg.99, City of Caterpillar, and Darkest Hour, which is just an absolute huge collection of iconic bands that helped mold the heavy music scene in DC/RVA and beyond back in the 90s and 00s. And man, it’s absolutely brutal. It’s just a rapid fire onslaught of quick and dirty hardcore. It sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear in a nasty basement show somewhere in DC about 20 years ago, so not only is the nostalgia factor high, but the pure chaotic energy is exactly what I want from this sort of music. So not only does it pay homage to the roots – and the basements – that these musicians came from, but it’s a perfect push forward into something that sound familiar but altogether new. These guys just formed last year, so of course they have not played any shows yet, but when they’re able to get out and play, I’ll be first in line. Music like this is made to be consumed in sweaty, shitty venues with terrible sound, and I can’t wait to go back.
Gatecreeper – This was a really excellent surprise album. Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to have this much to write about this week, but Gatecreeper really put it over the edge. Now, this does feel like an ‘extra’, it doesn’t feel like a fully prepared and marketed album. Not in a bad way, of course, but it feels more experimental, more fun, and riskier than what you’d expect from a traditional album. This album really feels like it would be more at home and better consumed on vinyl, mostly due to the presentation of the tracks. The eight song album clocks in at only 18 minutes long, with the first seven tracks – or the Side A, as it functionally is – coming at you as an onslaught of death metal infused hardcore and grind tracks all coming in at about a minute long. This initial barrage is followed up by one of the most captivating 11 minute long doom tracks I’ve ever heard. The juxtaposition alone of these two fairly polarizing yet complimentary styles is really remarkable, but even as they’re allowed to stand alone as singular “sides” of the record, they hold their own beautifully.
Thou & Emma Ruth Rundle – I should be surprised by this, but honestly, it’s pretty much par for the course for Thou, who seem to be able to crank out a new, interesting album every few months. But this EP is the companion release to the astoundingly good collaboration album with Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle released just a few months ago in November. What’s really cool though, is that while this was recorded in the same session as the tracks for the full length, these don’t feel like B-sides, this is a completely different sound. The diversity and flexibility of ERR and Thou’s musicianship is always impressive, but when presented in a package is brilliant as this, the example is even more shining. Just a few months ago, I was raving about how this project took the best parts of both entities and amplified them as they worked together to create something truly special, and the fact that they’re able to come together and do the exact same thing yet have it sound completely different is mind blowing. This is a very, very special project and I hope we keep hearing more from the two working together.
Singles – This is really the first week of 2021 where we’re getting a lot of new music coming at us at once. Tons of bands are releasing singles to give us a taste of what’s to come later in the year, so there’s honestly too much to address individually, but I’ll list out some of the notable ones.
Erra (metalcore), Hail the Sun (swancore), God is an Astronaut (post rock), LANDMVRKS (djent/metalcore), AFI (rock), Eyehategod (sludge/doom), Demon Hunter (metalcore), Ghost Iris (metalcore), Julien Baker (singer/songwriter), Spill Canvas (rock), Normandie (post-hardcore/pop), Monolord (doom), A.A. William (dark folk/cover), Darko (tech deathcore)
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