Over the course of the last decade ‘post-hardcore’ has rapidly become a diverse and all encompassing genre. As soon as you think you’ve seen it all, another stroke of brilliance kicks down the door. Australian five piece Drown This City are no exception to this rule, building on their 2019 release ‘Alpha // Survivor’ with six tracks of anger, catharsis, pain and promise.
Since the bands initial debut in 2016 it should be a crime that we haven’t been punched in the face with a full length, however you can find some solace that whilst it’s a few tracks short of the ideal amount the new record finds the band immersed in their heaviest sound yet – a promise often made but very rarely upheld.
Packed to the very brim with face melting lows and delicious beatdowns, the Southampton metal kings are set to release their latest full length LP this coming Friday. Aptly titled ‘Burn In The Flood’ OHOH will be releasing their third studio album via their own label //Hollow Music and join the ranks of a new movement sweeping the UK heavy music community, bypassing corporate labels completely and taking every win in their stride. Over the course of the last three years the south coast quintet have become a cornerstone of UK metalcore, making their mark in Rock Sound’s top 50 albums of 2018 amongst countless amounts of praise from critics and general music lovers alike. After the incredible reaction to their enormous second record ‘In Moment // In Memory’ it would have no doubt been easy for the band to have sat on their laurels and contemplated their success for the rest of their career. Instead the band have worked hard and waited, and are now set to launch what could potentially be the turning point in a career currently spanning eight years.
Synthwave trailblazer James Kent, better known as Perturbator, has returned with Lustful Sacraments, his fifth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2016’s The Uncanny Valley. Since 2012 he has been honing his craft, producing predominantly instrumental electronic music that recalls the sci-fi and cyberpunk film scores of the 1980s but with enough grit and distortion to appeal to fans of heavier genres. This time around however he has drawn from a broader range of influences, swapping out some of the retro-futuristic synths in favour of more goth and post-punk inspired soundscapes, resulting in an offering that is darker and more occult, but no less cinematic, than what has come before.
The overarching sound of the album is oppressive, dark and intense. With a penchant for demonically evil atmospherics, earth shattering riffs and skull splitting blast beats, Worm Shepherd have pushed the boundaries of what blackened death metal. The unearthly howls and haunting synths adds an eerie ethereal layer to the already diabolically disgusting slamming tech-death riffs. The musical intensity is matched by the lyrics. Every song is a tempestuous battle between light and dark, in a hard hitting, Hell-on-Earth soundscape. The album explores a series of various suicide scenarios, the main aim being to highlight the brutally difficult and increasingly important issue of mental health, with the hope of reaching out to those who feel this way and letting them know that they are not alone. This also ties in with the album’s title, Sòl is the sun goddess of Norse mythology, and is the sister of the personified moon, Máni. Keeping that in mind, when the album is put in that light there is a strange hope that forms in the waking of the sun, giving the haunting music an added layer of conceptual depth.
