(written by Islander)
Today’s collection will be shorter than usual, because I need to leave house and computer fairly early this morning for a day-long outing with my spouse. We have a ferry departure we need to make, so I won’t have any wiggle room.
I suppose my first choice for today is an obvious one, for reasons I suppose I’ll identify in case it’s less obvious than I think. After that I settled on a couple of “proven commodities” who are proving their worth again, and one new band that drew attention because of its lineup. I hope these songs and videos get your weekend off to the right start, as they did for me.
AT THE GATES (Sweden)
When Tomas Lindberg passed away last September from cancer of the mouth and palate, it was reported that he had recorded vocals for a new At the Gates album on the day before undergoing surgery last spring in an effort to arrest the disease. Yesterday the album was announced — a record named The Ghost of a Future Dead — and along with it we all got to hear its opening song, “The Fever Mask“, presented through a video by Patric Ullaeus that’s a tribute to Lindberg.
The band describe the album as “Tomas’ legacy“. They explained:
“Over the past few years, we worked closely with Tomas, discussing and refining every detail to ensure nothing was left to chance. In accordance with Tomas’ wishes – including the album title, sound mix, track order, artwork, and overall presentation – The Ghost of a Future Dead remains true to form. It combines the ferocious energy and hard-hitting powerful melodies that is the essence of At The Gates.”
The video is a moving homage to a great performer, and one who never seemed to let his celebrity go to his head. The song is also a great addition to the band’s legendary canon — a full-throttle and ferocious rampage fueled by blazing and boiling riffage, riotously hammering drumwork, and of course Tompa’s fiery screams, which have lost none of their blood-rushing intensity. It also includes a beautifully fluid guitar solo, filaments of soaring and mysteriously flowing melody, and bursts of gut-punching groove.
The Ghost of a Future Dead will be released on April 24th by Century Media Records.
https://atthegates.lnk.to/TheGhostofaFutureDead
https://www.facebook.com/AtTheGatesOfficial/
THE SILVER (U.S.)
The Silver’s 2021 debut album Ward of the Roses made a strong favorable impression on me (among many others), so much so that I included one of the tracks on our list of that year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs (here, if you want proof). At last, The Silver are returning with a second album, Looking Glass Hymnal Blue. The band’s lineup hasn’t changed — it still includes notable instrumental performers from Horrendous and Crypt Sermon, plus vocalist N. Duchemin.
The last day or two brought a video for a single off the album called “When the Moon is Three“, which Invisible Oranges premiered along with an interesting interview of the band’s vocalists by our friend Tom Compagna (here).
At first everything is blue… except for cover artist Paul Romano’s new mirror-image rendering of The Silver’s logo. The song, however, is not blue, in the usual sense of the word as applied to moods. As the album title portends, it’s more like peering through a looking glass at some very mysterious, intriguing, but sinister dimension.
To be sure, the song’s thumping rhythmic grooves are compulsive, but the squirming, darting, and sizzling guitars create a fiendishly head-twisting experience. When the pace briefly slows, the supernatural menace in the music becomes more prominent, just in time for ragged screams to begin maniacally ejecting words.
The song doesn’t follow a straight and narrow path (far from it), and so soaring clean vocals and briefly softer tones add yet another aspect, soon followed by another tapestry of shifting guitar manifestations and rhythm-section variations, augmented by further eruptions of deranged snarls and shrieks (and an ecstatically screaming lead guitar).
The song is elaborate, theatrical, and as grand as it is groovesome. It pays little heed to genre boundaries (even the label “progressive black metal” only touches upon two of the music’s multitudinous stylistic ingredients), but the songwriting holds everything together extremely well.
Looking Glass Hymnal Blue will be released on March 20 by Gilead Media.
https://gileadmedia.net/products/the-silver-looking-glass-hymnal-blue-lp
https://gileadmedia.bandcamp.com/album/looking-glass-hymnal-blue
https://www.facebook.com/TheSilverOfficial/
THE LEAVING (Int’l)
Now here’s the new band I mentioned in the intro, whose song I jumped at based on who’s in the lineup, i.e., Argentinian vocalist Dany Tee (Los Males del Mundo, Acathexis) and a trio of Dutch musicians — guitarist/bassist Kevin Storm (Heretoir, and a previous live perfomer with Shining, Vulture Industries, Equilibrium, and Kalmah, and more), guitarist Ferry Hofman (Endymaeria), and drummer Ed Warby (Ayreon, ex-Gorefest, ex-Hail of Bullets).
They have joined forces in a band called The Leaving, and they have a self-titled debut EP coming out on March 6th through Personal Records. Seven songs long, it is described as “a harrowing concept record that delves into the emotional and psychological torment of those left behind in a fractured relationship”.
The songs are identified by Roman numerals instead of names, and the one we can hear now (“VII“) is obviously the final track, and it arrived with a video that suits the moods of the music.
I didn’t know what to expect before listening, but the song turns out to be an excellent follow-on to The Silver’s new song — because it too is mysterious and menacing, and it doesn’t follow a safe and straight path either. On the other hand, it’s much more deeply shaded by torment and gloom than the song you just heard.
Hints of depressive black metal flow through the song’s opening phase, through sweeping and soaring tidal flows of distressing melody and Dany Tee’s scalding screams. But the heavy growl of the bass-line and pulse-punching drum-beats add a different dimension that contrasts with the fluid streams of musical sorrow.
Gravel-toned spoken words, haunting gasps, and cavernous gutturals expand the vocal palette, and the dismal moan and spectral wailing of the guitars add to the wretchedness of the mood but also sink hooks into the listener’s head. On the other hand, the band also cause the music to hammer and charge before sending layered swirls of melancholy melody into the stratosphere again.
At the end, an acoustic guitar and ethereally shimmering keys seem to channel introspection — thoughts of regret and longing.
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/the-leaving
DEFECT DESIGNER (Norway)
We’ve premiered songs from each of Defect Designer’s last three releases. Maybe we’ll get to do it again. The last time, it was a track from their 2024 album Chitin, which I referred to as a “bewildering musical menagerie”. But that’s been true of all their music, a source of head-spinning and sometimes confounding surprises, both from album to album and within each one.
Their forthcoming fourth album, Depressants, now has a May 15 release date on Transcending Obscurity Records and again features wild cover art by Ian Miller. One mind-bending carnival of a song from the album (“Repeated Aversive Stimuli Inducer“) was included in T.O.’s 2026 label sampler when that surfaced in early January (you’ll find it further below), and now there’s a second advance track out in the world — “Carte Blanche“.
I heard about the new one yesterday morning from my compatriot DGR, who said it was “chaotic” and “a walking James Bond reference, including them just massacring the theme at the end.”
One prominent dictionary defines “Carte Blanche” as the “complete freedom to act as one wishes or thinks best”, which makes sense because it also more literally means a “blanck check”, one that’s already signed and which the bearer can fill in as they like. But you might also think of the song, like the first one released from the album, as a bunch of very talented and not entirely sane people gleefully diving through a box of musical toys, throwing them up in the air and scattering them about the room with abandon.
As the song’s name suggests, the music is free-wheeling — riotously so — as are the vocals. It’s vicious and mauling but also bounding, bursting, and burbling. It offers chances for toes to tap and heads to pump, but it also swarms and seems to come apart at the seams.
The band’s very burly bass eventually brutishly elbows everything else out of the way except for some wispy simmering sounds. And then the bass gets to run free again, accompanied by running and somersaulting drums and all manner of guitar freakishness.
Sure enough, near the four-minute mark we get the James Bond theme! And then the music goes into carnival dancing mode, but with one more tip of the hat to that theme. Why the hell not?
https://defectdesignerband.bandcamp.com/album/depressants
https://www.facebook.com/defectdesigner1