Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, the honor goes to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Cobra (Rock Remix)” featuring Spiritbox.
Heavy metal got a major platform on Thursday when Megan Thee Stallion dropped a remix of her latest single “Cobra” featuring Canadian prog upstarts Spiritbox.
The original song — which features a minimal trap beat — has a notable shred guitar instrumental break, so the foundation was already in place for Spiritbox to metal-up the Houston rapper’s new tune.
The remix is practically a reinvention of the track, retaining only Megan’s verses, which are put against the band’s technical metal riffs. It inherently brings to mind the rap/nu-metal of yore, driven home by Courtney LaPlante’s chorus — specific to this remix — which goes into “Bring Me to Life”-by-Evanescence territory.
Fingers crossed this becomes a cross-genre hit, because we’d love to see more of these collabs between pop superstars like Megan Thee Stallion and deserving workaholic metal bands like the ever-prolific Spritbox.
Honorable Mentions:
Full of Hell and Nothing – “Like Stars in the Firmament”
Full of Hell and Nothing’s first collaborative single “Spend the Grace” was an immediate favorite here at Heavy Consequence (and nabbed HSOTW honors the week it dropped). The second single “Like Stars in the Firmament” is a more mellow affair, no doubt falling more on the Nothing side of the collab. Still, the production is massive, with little sonic wrinkles and subtle flourishes of noise peeking in and out of the mix, which we’ll credit to the Full of Hell contingent. It’s a lovely comedown from the crushingly climactic “Spend the Grace.”
Ryujin feat. Matt Heafy – “The Rainbow Song”
Heavy metal generally connotes the dark and gloomy, but it can also be positively harmonious, as evidenced by Ryujin’s “The Rainbow Song.” Beautifully melodic guitar playing runs through the Japanese band’s latest single, much like the flowing rivers seen in the music video. Having formed in January, the power metal act is fresh on the scene, but its already attracted the attention of fellow melodic-metal riffer Matt Heafy of Trivium, who guests on this track and made a bold prediction: “Ryujin is a band who will take over the world.”
Sodom – “Witching Metal”
German thrash pioneers Sodom are celebrating their origins with the new 1982 EP. The collection includes re-recordings of some of their earliest tracks — material that would pave the way for the extreme metal revolution and form the basis for black metal and death metal. It’s interesting to hear how the vets interpret some of their old songs like “Witching Metal” so many decades later — particularly in modern high fidelity. This is no revisionist offering; rather, the German titans lay waste to the old anthems, delivering ravishing, evil thrash with a master’s touch.