Irreversible Mechanism made a strikingly good impression on us in 2018 when Blood Music released their second album, Immersion. For one, my comrade DGR lavishly reviewed the album and then positioned it at No. 8 on his year-end list. In his assessment, the band moved from “the ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ style of writing in their debut album” toward “something that sounds like a head-on collision of Fallujah, Rivers Of Nihil, and a handful of other post-metal groups currently working on the fringes of the tech-death scene”.

And for another, I added a track from Immersion to the 2018 edition of our Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. It wasn’t an album that I initially expected to be a contender for that award, because it’s such a massive record, not only in its length but also in its near-constant all-out assault on the senses, so densely packed with ideas that it lends itself to new discoveries every time you dive back into the hurricane. Given that the songs also tend to flow into each other, it’s also an album that’s probably best experienced in a single session, and it’s tough to carve out individual tracks from the one that preceded or followed it. Nevertheless, the more time I spent with the album, the more addicted to it I became and the more convinced I became that something from the album belonged on the list.

And now we have the opportunity, two years later, to revisit the music of this talented group from Minsk, Belarus. They’ve made a play-through video for a song named “Footprints in the Sand” that appears dead-center in Immersion’s track-list, whose lyrics have an eerily prescient connection to our current pandemic age, and it’s our pleasure to share it with you today. Continue reading »