(written by Islander)
I only had one premiere to write up for today and only one other post on the calendar (an interview you can find here), so I felt a compulsion to add something more, hence this brief roundup of new songs.
The first two picks were pretty obvious to me, coming from bands we’ve been following at NCS for a good long while. The third one was from a project I knew nothing about before this morning, but after hearing it I felt like a cut of meat that had been “tenderized” until paper thin, and I thought you might like to feel that way too.
EXITIUM SUI (Australia)
Time being short, I’ll dispense with an introduction to Exitium Sui, other than to remind you that it’s a project by which Chris Gebauer (of Deadspace, among other bands) has inclined toward a fusion of funeral doom and black metal. If you’d like to know more, you can find our many previous articles about E.S. here.
Yesterday Exitium Sui released a new single, “Only Death Remembers“, from an upcoming album named Unravelling. Chris introduced it on social media this way:
Almost 2 years in the making: a harrowing and vicious cycle of spiritual death and rebirth. This track is one of the few living survivors whose soul withstood the constant evolution of the project. I have been very selective over this time about what remains emotive and true, transformative and destructive.
I first set my sights on releasing this record in April this year, but the material fell short of my expectations. My good friends at Meuse Music Records granted me as much time as I needed for this release to materialise before me.
The full length album will be set to release in the near future both digitally and physically, once again through Meuse Music Records, who did an astounding job on the production of Endless/Regression.
Until then, the dark gate is now open, and the demons are ravenous.
In this new song, Exitium Sui creates vast and haunting tides of symphonic sound crossing over a slow and stupendously heavy march, pierced by shrill and frantically swirling flashes, truly harrowing shrieks, truly monstrous growls, and truly funereal singing. The impact is catastrophically doomed and daunting.
The song breaks up the staggering march with an eerily ringing piano interlude (a lament), and also pulls the listener even deeper into agony with slowly moaning leads. The song builds toward a crescendo of insanity and calamity, with double-bass rumbling, searing high-end swaths, and shattering vocal extremity — followed by the re-emergence of that ghostly piano.
https://exitiumsui.bandcamp.com/track/only-death-remembers
https://www.facebook.com/exitiumsuiband/
https://www.instagram.com/exitiumsuiband/
STARER (U.S.)
Time still being short, I’ll also dispense with an introduction of Kentucky’s Starer (the solo project of Josh Hines), and again refer you to our collection of previous writings about the band’s music if you’re just now encountering them.
The song below, which just surfaced in the last day or two, is the opening track on a new Starer album named Ancient Monuments and Modern Sadness that’s due for release through Fiadh Productions and Adirondack Black Mass on October 10th.
Starer describes the album as “8 songs of ancient poetry set to a heavy modern soundtrack.” The opening song’s intriguing/disturbing name is “I Cry Your Mother’s Blood“, but I couldn’t determine from searching which ancient poem was its inspiration.
As for the music, it’s wild and worrying. Driven by hard-charging beats, it explodes in searing waves of rising and falling sound that are both incendiary and agonized, or like the senses-submerging wail of caustic tormented sirens. Even when the pace slows and steadies, those immersive swaths are disturbingly steeped in pain.
The music’s intensity magnifies through the appearance of blistering screams, blasting drums, roiling and pulsing guitars, and brazen and blazing stratospheric extravagance. Dismal riffing also intrudes, and the song also segues into a phase of avalanche percussive tumbles and a piercing guitar harmony that seems to cry out in grief.
It’s yet another breathtaking song from Starer, as so many others have been.
https://starer.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-monuments-and-modern-sadness-2
http://instagram.com/starermusic
https://www.facebook.com/starermusic
OLD YEAR (U.S.)
And now for that song I mentioned at the outset from a band (Old Year) that I’d never heard of before. It appears to be a trio based in Boise, Idaho, who made their advent with a self-named single in early 2023. This final song in today’s brief collection is the first to be revealed from a four-song debut album named No Dissent.
This song, “Mechanical Birth“, isn’t “easy listening”. It’s ruinous — ruinous in different ways. At first it disorients listeners with a hallucinatory collage of swirling, hooting, and skittering sounds, while simultaneously bludgeoning our skulls with humongous, methodically administered percussive blows.
And then even more titanic low-frequency tones come in, magnifying the song’s pulverizing brute-force heaviness, accompanied by bursts of sizzling fretwork delirium and gruesome gutturals of cavernous depth. The band subtly shift the fretwork upward in range, which only seems to make the experience more miserable, but they don’t back off their dedication to pounding listeners into a thin, blood-misted paste.
Yeah, sure, it will make most people want to go into a full-body heave (the whole body, not just the head banging), even as those needling riff-bursts are squirming their way deeper into the brain and making mincemeat of the grey matter (perversely, they become kind of mesmerizing despite how claustrophobic and sickening they are).
Eventually, the band begin inflicting other forms of punishment, inserting enormous avalanche rumbles, slithers of dismally moaning and eerily screaming melody, and freakish fretwork spasms, all of it backed by miasmatic swaths of caustic abrasion and still punctuated by those catastrophic pile-driver blows.
No Dissent will be released by Apocalyptic Witchcraft Recordings on October 24th. Be afraid, be very afraid….
https://oldyearboise.bandcamp.com/album/no-dissent
https://www.facebook.com/OldYearBoise/