(Andy Synn has a darkly dynamic Danish debut to recommend today)
Being a music lover – and I mean a real music lover – means being constantly caught in a tug of war between listening to what you already love and/or finding new stuff to add to your collection.
Because, as much as I enjoy spending time with old favourites, re-discovering and re-evaluating albums that perhaps I didn’t appreciate at the time, it’s just as important to keep looking forwards, to stay engaged with new records and new releases, to stop myself from becoming cynical and jaded and stuck in my ways.
Which is why, year after year, I’m always so excited to encounter new bands (or, at least, bands who are new to me) helping keep the flame alive in their own way.
And one of those bands is up-and-coming Danish Sludge-core crew Kōya, who’ve just finished a busy festival season and celebrated by releasing their debut album, Pendula.
First off, let me get one little bugbear off my chest… bands, stop just calling your intro track “Intro”, it’s lazy and makes it feel like an afterthought that you might as well just skip, and you can all do better than that.
Thankfully Kōya most definitely can do better, as the fittingly furious strains of “Ruin” quickly demonstrate.
The guitars seethe and surge, the drums pop and burst, and the bass thrums like a high-tensile electrical cable, with the whole track positively pulsing with raw, rambunctious energy (plus the occasional bit of beefy metallic groove) that sits somewhere between Eldpop-era Martyrdöd and Passion-period Catharsis.
It’s a hell of a way to kick the album into high gear (especially with the vocals spitting fire and brimstone over the top of it all), but thankfully isn’t an anomaly, as the even more abrasive assault of “Ruiner” and the darker, sludgier churn of “Charmer” pick up the baton… and then proceed to beat you black and blue with it.
The eagle-eared among you (and I may have mixed up my metaphors there a little) will probably notice that the latter track in particular shares a fair bit in common with early Cult of Luna (back from when they were still considered more of a moody, miserable Hardcore band, remember that? Pepperidge farm remembers…) with its heaving, almost hypnotic, riffs and weighty, claustrophobic atmsophere, and this isn’t an aberration either, as the likes of the lurching, low-end heavy “Glass Mind” and the brooding “Storm Before the Calm” should prove.
That being said, Kōya are, first and foremost, a Hardcore band… a dark, heavy Hardcore band… so while the Sludge and/or Post-Metal inspired elements permeating this album may be undeniable so are the influences of bands like Disfear and Converge, whose foot- and/or fingerprints are all over the visceral audio violence of hard-hitting highlights like “Grave” and “Webbed”.
True, the group’s insistence on everthing being turned up to eleven at (almost) all times – with only the occasional exception, such as the sombre penultimate passage of “Drown Me In This Ocean”, to break up the album’s heavily distorted, d-beat driven barrage – eventually starts to yield slightly diminishing returns (there’s definitely a bit of listener fatigue setting in around the time you reach “Spiraling”), but if you’re a fan of any of the band’s mentioned above – or even the likes of LLNN and Conjurer – then you should absolutely check out Pendula (which, as it happens, has just been added to Bandcamp today) at your earliest convenience.