We’ll venture the guess that most of you have never heard of the North Texas duo who call themselves The Tongue of Eden. In part that’s because, until today, they have only had one single to their name. In part, it’s also because their music doesn’t fit within any of the orthodox sub-genres of metal. As one sign of that, consider the fact that they recommend their music for fans of these bands:
Behemoth, Carpenter Brut, Perturbator, Crystal Lake, Igorrr, Dance with the Dead, Waveshaper, The Browning
How does that work? The odds are that whatever words first pop into your heads when you read each of those names one by one, putting all the words together likely results in a kind of jumble that doesn’t make a lot of sense. The odds are that for some of you no words will pop into your heads at all.
Fortunately, The Tongue of Eden‘s music holds together much better than you would expect after playing that word-association game, even if it leads you outside your usual comfort zones.
What we have for you today is a lyric video for the band’s second single, “Stone Burner“, which will be released for streaming on September 8th. It does include ingredients from metal, or you wouldn’t be seeing it at this site, but it also represents the band’s take on the “Outrun” style of synthwave. And if you don’t know what that refers to (we didn’t), some googling will get you some learning.
Lyrically, “Stone Burner” is (in the band’s words) “a commentary on the hardened pathways created in the mind by religious indoctrination, and the fortitude required to carve a new path.”
Musically, the song is a head-twisting amalgam of dark shadows and lavish lights — of menace, ferocity, and otherworldly splendor. And it will get your muscles jumping too.
On the metal side of its confounding but captivating equation, it includes bestial growls, cauterizing screams, and ghastly incantations, as well as doses of gritty abrasion, searing synths, frenzied riffing, lo-frequency upheaval, and guitars that eerily wail in ecstasy.
But it also includes big, pounding EDM beats designed to make the floor bounce, feverishly skittering electro-pulses, brilliantly glittering and swirling keys, bursts of hyper-speed electronic percussion, and slow dreamlike cascades of mesmerizing melody.
We mentioned that The Tongue of Eden have one other previous single to their name, and we’re including a stream of that one next.
Entitled “Reprehensible“, it pulls from different traditions of electronic music than the one we’re presenting today, but also again brings in a vocal bestiary, and it’s an even more frightening and vicious assault on the senses. It has its own jolting grooves, but maybe more on the industrial side of things than EDM.
It also arrived with a video, a cool one that let’s us see this masked duo doing their thing.
The two people responsible for The Tongue of Eden, including the engineering and production, are Eric Park (Wrought of Obsidian, A Devil’s Daydream, and ex-Devourment) and Ian Nizialek (YSA).
They plan to continue releasing singles in 2023 leading up to release of their first album, Fallow.
PRE-SAVE “STONE BURNER”:
https://li.sten.to/stoneburner
FOLLOW THE TONGUE OF EDEN:
https://thetongueofeden.com
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https://www.tiktok.com/@thetongueofeden
https://twitter.com/thetongueofeden
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