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 top song goes to Inter Arma’s “New Heaven.”
You gotta hand it to Inter Arma. For a band that considers itself “cursed,” the Virginia sludge metal outfit continues to trudge onward despite a constant barrage of setbacks: inter-band turmoil, near-death experiences, creative self-doubt, a pandemic.
In the press release for their newly announced album, New Heaven, Inter Arma describe a conundrum of feeling “too metal or not metal enough” for their target audience — a very relatable problem for any metal musician who’s familiar with the elitism that can sometimes undermine the scene. There’s a sense of cathartic frustration to the album’s lead single and title track, as if the band is flushing out all this baggage in the form of its most complex and extreme composition to date.
Nearing dissonant death metal in parts, the song conjures a barren otherworldly landscape — not unlike the cratered moon-like surface depicted on the LP sleeve — and is suffocatingly brutal in all departments (drummer T.J. Childers’ “nonsensically” complex rhythms in particular).
“New Heaven is the culmination of four years worth of adversity ranging from near death experiences, multiple member changes and of course a global pandemic,” remarked Childers.
It sure sounds like it. This is vicious, seething sludge metal, stretched to its breaking point.
Honorable Mentions:
Accept – “Humanoid”
Metal legends Accept announced their new album Humanoid this week, sharing the AI-themed title track and lead single. The topic offers plenty of dystopian subject matter for a metal band like Accept. Appropriately, the German vets imbue their signature classic heavy metal sound with clean and power-metal/thrash technicality, the latter echoing the modern sci-fi aesthetics of their latest full-length effort.
CNTS – “I Won’t Work for You”
CNTS are a new punk group featuring guitarist Mike Crain of Dead Cross alongside drummer Kevin Avery (Retox, Planet B), and vocalist Matt Cronk (Qui). The band has a debut album ready to drop on Ipecac Recordings, where CNTS sardonic sense of humor and garage-y hardcore will be right at home. Single and LP opener “I Won’t Work for You” introduces the band’s sound and Cronk’s distinct delivery — his vocal take sounding like it was recorded straight out of the practice space. While some producers would scoff at such a move, it adds a level of realness and believability that is all but absent from a lot of modern, studio-sterilized punk rock.
Knocked Loose – “Blinding Faith”
It was a tough choice between Inter Arma and Knocked Loose for the top spot this week, mainly because both bands took a similar approach to their new material, essentially pushing to furthest boundaries of each band’s respective genre. For Knocked Loose, this means hardcore that is bent, twisted, and deformed into some kind of nu-metal/post-hardcore/metalcore hybrid — as heard on “Blinding Faith.” Brian Garris’ throat-shredding vocals are front and center, backed by an arrangement that’s as aggro as it is complicated, rife with on-a-dime tempo changes and an urgency verging on manic.