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The guitarist's decision to join Motley Crue seems to have severed his relationship with his former boss. Continue reading…

The guitarist's decision to join Motley Crue seems to have severed his relationship with his former boss. Continue reading…

Nearly a decade has passed since Italian black metal project Lorn last graced these halls. Arrayed Claws greatly impressed the sage Eldritch Elitist back in 2017, who praised its “caustic edge and sheer strangeness.” The man behind the project, Radok, seems to have been relatively quiet in the last nine years, but I don’t think he was idle. In the intervening years, I think Radok has been watching and listening, and he’s found the present lacking. In an endless ocean of new content, Radok sees naught but an arid desert, devoid of depth. On Lorn’s fourth full-length, Searing Blood, Radok promises to reject modernity’s vapid content singularity and conceptually return to black metal’s roots. Is Searing Blood an oasis in the desert, or is it just a mirage?

Those returning to Lorn will immediately notice some differences between Arrayed Claws and Searing Blood. First and foremost, Radok’s newest effort actually has a low end. Where Arrayed Claws was almost grating in its shrill and disquieting tone, Searing Blood rumbles and shakes the ground upon which it stands. This makes for a more physically enjoyable experience, avoiding the listener fatigue that threatened Arrayed Claws. Fans will also clock the shift from fairly distilled black metal toward the atmospheric variety. Radok’s 8-string guitar is still a deeply unsettling force to reckon with (“Haderburg”), but there’s an unexpected tenderness to Searing Blood. While it’s not uncommon for atmoblack bands to focus on the majesty of nature, Radok approaches it through a lens of disillusionment with contemporary life, weaving a sense of loss, betrayal, and impotent outrage into Searing Blood.

Change isn’t always a good thing, but it is on Searing Blood. While Lorn does pay homage to the past with brilliantly discordant melodicism (“Searing Blood,” “Leuchtenburg”), an increased prevalence of synths and the introduction of new elements well-suited to atmospheric spaces allow Lorn greater breadth of expression. “Leuchtenburg” channels Panopticon with metal-stringed chords that hint at a synth-backed, acoustic interlude. Draped in the gothic tones of Unto Others, picked leads on “Gallows” float in and out, evoking a beautiful sense of tension and anxiety. Airy, choral synths and ringing melodies bestow instrumental “Ordo Draconis” with a magical, otherworldly quality. Through it all, Searing Blood’s heart of aching tremolos and agonizing screams adeptly evokes the Romantic’s view of Modernity, an indictment of what is and a yearning for what was.

Lorn’s exploration of a new form isn’t without its stumbles, though. The acoustic interlude in “Leuchtenburg” is a little long, and the synths can distract from the strings. At over nine minutes, “Gallows” similarly sags under its own weight, and “Ordo Draconis” features a jarring transition that only leads to a mismatched back half. Sample usage is a bit heavy-handed,¹ and Searing Blood wouldn’t suffer for their omission. Lorn also relies heavily on certain compositional decisions, robbing them of their impact. Short lulls that explode into a furious bridge appear far more often than they should, even multiple times in a single track (“Gallows,” “Threshold’s Tragedy”). And while I appreciate a good fade out, ending every song that way grows stale quickly.

Searing Blood isn’t what I expected. I had prepared to be unsettled and challenged, but I was instead guided through a poignant and emotive journey. Both novel and familiar, Searing Blood presents a surprisingly singular vision. Rather than simply refining Lorn’s particular flavor of dissonant black metal, Radok tills new soil with well-worn tools. Lorn’s new direction is compelling, missteps aren’t fatal, and there’s ample room for Radok to both improve and continue exploring this space. A tighter and more varied composition would aid any future efforts. Searing Blood won’t necessarily drop any jaws, but for those on the fence, it should convince you to keep an eye on Lorn.

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Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps
Label: I, Voidhanger Records
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: May 15th, 2026

The post Lorn – Searing Blood Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

If there was a competition for the least Google-friendly name in history, A would score pretty highly. Back in 1993, it wouldn’t have been a problem but subsequently searching for ‘A Band’ proved futile. So what happened? It went like this; Back in 2002 there was a rock band called A and they hit big with their third album ‘Hi-Fi Serious’, propelled by the incredible single ‘Nothing’. They were invited onto the main stages at festivals, then they released the awesome standalone single ‘Good Time’. In 2005 they released their strongest record to date ‘Teen Dance Ordnance’. And no one bought it. Ironically their final song ‘Wisdom’ left off with the line “waiting for you…”

After sporadically touring as a ‘hobby’, that wait is over. They have finally followed it up with ‘Prang’. After such a long time, it’s hard to know what to expect. Listen back to those big singles, and they show the band at their most straightforward. Most of their discography is weirder. Some consider them a pop punk band, but their music has little in common with Green Day or Blink-182. It’s a distinctive sound that leans more toward rock, but their songs don’t follow a template. Each feels different yet is clearly the work of the same band. ‘Prang’ shares these features, in effect it sounds exactly like a record made by A after a 20-odd year break, which is both its strength and weakness.

Broadly, the difference between this record and those from their heyday is it is being released by Cooking Vinyl and not a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. There is no pressure to write a huge chart-topping banger, so they haven’t. Instead, the songs lean in different, more interesting directions. It means the album is stranger than you might expect, taking longer to settle into, but it’s also comfortably the band’s most consistent record. In essence, it’s confident, unfiltered and delightfully weird.

Way back in the ‘Hi-fi Serious’ days, the band’s guitarist Marc Chapman appeared in Total Guitar Magazine. The article discussed his left-handed playing style and love for guitar solos. Here you can hear those skills being put to good use. While there is plenty of showing off, like the louche guitar solo on ‘Shit Summer’ or the wicked fretwork on ‘Kings Of Lowestoft’, mostly he’s writing interesting, thoughtful parts. Notably there’s a great interpretation of the classic ‘I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll’ on ‘All In’ which deploys the lick like an offensive weapon. Similarly, the hard sound that opens ‘Hello Sunshine’ has teeth but it chews rather than bites. The whole record is like this, in effect, tasteful.

That said the sound is surprisingly punk, featuring a rough, anything-goes edge that a lot of pop punk doesn’t. It’s most obvious on the delightfully rowdy ‘Techno Viking’ but even the more rocky ‘Back To The Shop’ feels nicely dangerous. Similarly ‘Walkover’ has a fast sway, driven by the snapping drumbeat.

The most notable thing, and perhaps shines a light on what it is that makes A so distinctive, is that the songs refuse to stay in one shape. This is a double edged sword. The band’s biggest hits are relatively straightforward and delight in repetition. Here they avoid that. Giles Perry’s keyboards are quite often used to give the songs a strange vibe or transition the song to a different space. In the case of ‘Bring On The Likes‘ it’s an awe-inspiring shift.

Jason Perry remains an ideal frontman. He’s armed with a distinctive voice that sounds unique, no matter how he expresses himself, along with a wicked sense of humour, a distaste for simple song structures and a restless creative energy. Throughout the record he favours a slacker vocal that is a mixture of singing, spoken word and melody. It’s tamed by age, but also bubbling with enthusiasm there is a cheekiness and a defined sense of humour. After the band’s initial run he worked as a professional songwriter, producing Grammy winning records, which might explain why this record sound so good. It’s biting and bassy but with a pleasing depth so that through decent headphones you can feel its rich tone.

Where once Jason Perry mocked old people as “losers” for not being able to use computers, here he’s cast as an old person himself struggling with the online world. It’s a canny choice and tells you a lot about his state of mind, although not quite as much as the discussion of mental health and struggling with cancer on the aptly named ‘Shit Summer’.

‘Bring On The Likes’ feels very much like a companion piece to their 1999 single ‘Old Folks’. It’s a stunning, spoken word, almost stream of conscious song. Indeed, Perry uses this approach on numerous tracks, it’s curious approach and defines the record’s entire feel. Often, he makes strange choices work counter to you’d expect, given the music. Take songs like ‘Back To The Shop’ which have a real “why would you use that as a chorus” vibe. It’s a common theme, a mismatch between what Jason Perry is doing and what you might expect. This is unusual and ultimately robs the album of a couple of straight-up classics, and yet, it gives the songs a strong character. This simply couldn’t be another record by another band.

‘Comment Leaver’ is sung from the perspective of a Daily Mail reader and is a barbed disassembly of that type of person. It also requires him to sing “I’m a little racist” which is a choice. Indeed this is a record full of interesting creative decisions, strong song writing and a talent that has aged like a fine wine.

‘Prang’ lacks a big, simple single to really grab you by both ears but it’s easily A’s most consistent album. It’s a record about finding humour in the passage of time, about having fun and keeping the spark alive. It’s about joy, it’s about love and if we ain’t got that then we ain’t got much and we ain’t got nothing, nothing.

IAN KENWORTHY

Italy’s laCasta continue to push their sound deeper into hostile and ritualistic territory with OLIBANVM, a record where black metal atmosphere, crust urgency, and symbolic violence merge into something both oppressive and strangely hypnotic. Built around themes of transformation through suffering, the album treats ritual not as comfort, but as pressure, rupture, and collapse. I spoke with guitarist and composer Mario Morgante about the album’s conceptual foundations, the balance between aggression and restraint, and why laCasta increasingly see themselves operating in the space between black metal and crust rather than fully belonging to either.

The concept of ‘Olibanvm’ revolves around incense extracted through deliberate wounds. At what point did that image become the emotional core of the album rather than just a lyrical motif?
It became the core when we realised it wasn’t simply describing the concept, but reflecting the way the music itself was forming. The idea of something precious emerging through violence began to mirror the compositional process: tension, rupture and the extraction of something essential from that fracture. At that point, it stopped being an illustration and became a structure.

There’s a ritualistic quality running through the album, but it never feels mystical in a comforting sense. What attracts you to ritual as something violent or transformative rather than spiritual refuge?
Because ritual, in its origin, is never comfortable. It is a transition and transition is never neutral. It implies loss, force and change. We are drawn to ritual as a mechanism that transforms through pressure rather than offering protection from it.

Black metal and crust both carry rawness, but very different emotional energies. What do those two genres allow each other to express inside laCasta that they couldn’t alone?
Black metal allows space, atmosphere and a sense of collapse that is not immediate. Crust brings urgency and direct physical impact. Together, they create a tension in which neither stasis nor pure aggression dominates. One expands time, the other compresses it.

The symbolism of blood, gold, and incense runs throughout the album. Did you approach those images more historically, spiritually, or psychologically?
We never treated them as separate categories. Historically, they carry power, ritual and extraction. Spiritually, they relate to transcendence and control over death. Psychologically, they represent value produced through violence. All these layers coexist without hierarchy.

There’s a relentless forward momentum to the material, but the album also knows when to slow into something almost oppressive. How important is restraint in music this aggressive?
Restraint is what gives aggression weight. Without it, intensity becomes flat. The slower or more suffocating sections are not decorative contrasts, but structural pressure points that make the faster moments necessary.

Was there a moment during writing where the album became darker than you originally intended?
Not darker in a deliberate sense, but more uncompromising than expected. At a certain point, the material stops following intention and begins to reveal its own direction. We did not try to correct it.

Compared to ‘In Æternvm’, what part of laCasta’s identity became sharper or more exposed on this record?
Physicality. This album is less atmospheric as distance and more direct in impact. The identity is less veiled and more exposed in its structural violence.

How do you prevent extremity from becoming numbness when writing music built on intensity and abrasion?
By avoiding uniform intensity. If everything is extreme, nothing is. We aim to work through contrast, erosion and dynamics rather than constant escalation. The goal is impact, not saturation.

There’s a strong sense of inevitability across the album, almost as if the songs are collapsing under their own weight. Was that atmosphere intentional from the start?
Yes, but not as a narrative concept. More as a structural instinct. The music was built to feel like it is moving toward collapse rather than resolution.

The phrase “No compromise. No redemption.” feels less like a slogan and more like a worldview. Does that mentality shape the band creatively beyond the music itself?
It functions more as a filter than a statement. It shapes decisions in terms of coherence and direction, not ideology. It defines what is excluded as much as what is included.

At this point, do you see laCasta more as an evolution of black metal, an evolution of hardcore, or something that no longer fully belongs to either world?
Neither exclusively. Both genres are part of the language, but the intention is not to evolve them. It is to operate within the intersection they create, without needing to resolve into a single identity. In this latest work, however, black metal is more dominant than hardcore: we like to define ourselves these days as crust black metal, a definition that feels more accurate to what we have become.

Thank you for the space and for the questions; it has been a pleasure to go into detail on ‘OLIBANVM’. A greeting to everyone reading and to those who continue to follow our path.

https://www.facebook.com/lacastaband

https://lacasta.bandcamp.com/

Eight Miles High was the single that should have launched The Byrds into the stratosphere. So why did it instead mark the precise moment when it all came crashing down?

Some supergroups just aren’t worth the sum of their parts. These are the exceptions

Muse have shared another song from their upcoming album ‘The Wow! Signal’, and it is space-age prog-rock at its most exploratory.

Titled ‘Hexagons’, it’s a vibrant, stratospheric expedition into the most technically bold and audaciously beautiful components of the band’s sound. From the noddling synths and bodacious guitars of the grand introduction, to Matt Bellamy’s wonderfully soaring vocal display, it’s the sort of creation that feels out of this world in more ways than one. Like staring into the great beyond, the vast openness of the unknown, with a sense of awe and wonder, it’s the perfect track to accompany the band on their current voyage across the universe.

Unapologetically Muse.

Have a listen below, and check out the stunning visuals that accompany it.

‘The Wow! Signal’ is set for release on June 26. It will also include the huge ‘Cryogen’ which sounds a lot like this:

The band are set to make their way across the US on a huge headline tour, with support coming Bloc Party, Portugal. The Man and The Temper Trap.

So it’s going to be very special, basically.

Here are all the dates that you need to know:

JULY

05 – ST. LOUIS Hollywood Casino Amphitheater * ~
07 – NOBLESVILLE Ruoff Music Center * ~
10 – TINLEY PARK Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre * ~
11 – CINCINATTI Riverbend Music Center * ~
13 – CLARKSTON Pine Knob Music Theatre * ~
15 – TORONTO RBC Amphitheatre * ~
18 – MANSFIELD Xfinity Center * ~
22 – HOLMDEL PNC Bank Arts Center * ~
24 – SARATOGA SPRINGS Albany Med Health System at SPAC * ~
25 – WANTAGH Northwell at Jones Beach Theater * ~
28 – COLUMBIA Merriweather Post Pavilion * ~
29 – CAMDEN Freedom Mortgage Pavilion * ~

AUGUST

10 – CHARLOTTE Truliant Amphitheater – ~
12 – ATLANTA Lakewood Amphitheatre – ~
14 – DALLAS Dos Equis Pavilion – ~
15 – AUSTIN Germania Insurance Amphitheater – ~
18 – GREENWOOD Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater – ~ +
20 – WEST VALLEY CITY Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre – ~
22 – RIDGEFIELD Cascades Amphitheater – ~
23 – AUBURN White River Amphitheatre – ~
26 – WHEATLAND Toyota Amphitheatre – ~
27 – MOUNTAIN VIEW Shoreline Amphitheatre – ~
29 – CHULA VISTA North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre – ~
31 – LOS ANGELES Hollywood Bowl – ~

* support from Bloc Party
– support from Portugal. The Man
~ support from The Temper Trap

The post Muse Share Stratospheric New Track ‘Hexagons’ appeared first on Rock Sound.

Brazil’s ABSTRACTED have never been a band interested in technical excess for its own sake, but with Hiraeth they sound more focused, emotional, and confident than ever before. The album still carries the complexity and weight expected from modern progressive death metal, yet beneath all the shifting structures and dense arrangements there’s something far more human holding it together: atmosphere, tension, melancholy, and restraint. I spoke with José Consani about lineup changes, emotional weight in heavy music, overproduced modern prog metal, and why Hiraeth became the most honest record ABSTRACTED have made so far.

Hi! First of all, did something change inside ABSTRACTED after Atma Conflux?
Hi! Yes, actually, we went through some major lineup changes. From the Atma Conflux era until now, only two founding members have remained in the band: Riverton (now living in Germany) and Rosano. Fernando, Carol, and me [José] joined shortly before Atma was released, and Leonardo came in a few months before we started the recording sessions for Hiraeth.

A lot of progressive metal bands today throw technical parts everywhere but forget to write actual songs. Hiraeth feels more controlled even when it gets chaotic. Were you trying to cut away some of the excess this time?
Yes, definitely! I’m glad you said that because that was exactly one of our goals with this album: to create something cohesive and emotionally engaging, an album people would genuinely enjoy listening to because of the melodies, atmosphere, structure, and everything else we could use to communicate with the audience beyond just technical ability.
We tried to treat technical sections as just another tool for building the musical narrative, using them only when they truly served the song instead of making them the core of the composition.

The opener, “Axis”, goes past nine minutes, but it never really feels bloated. Meanwhile, a lot of modern prog bands can barely survive four/five minutes without repeating themselves. Did you approach songwriting differently on this album?
Actually, we never really thought about song length during the writing process. The length came naturally from the number of ideas each song apparently demanded.
Maybe that’s the point where a long song either succeeds or fails. If you’re writing a nine or ten-minute track just because bands like Dream Theater did it a lot, your chances of losing focus become much higher.
At the same time, while “Axis” ended up over nine minutes long, songs like “Languish” and “To Quench” said everything we needed to say in around five minutes. And that’s completely fine.

The album moves from total chaos into almost calm, jazz-like moments without sounding forced. That kind of transition usually sounds terrible when bands overthink it. How do you stop the music from turning into pure “prog exercise”?
Well, I’m afraid we don’t really have a formula for that either [haha]. It’s actually really nice to hear you say that, especially because it wasn’t something we approached in a calculated way.
I think the reason is pretty simple: we don’t add jazzy interludes just because other bands are doing it. We’re not trying to sound cool or follow trends. We genuinely listen to a lot of jazz, we love that language, and progressive music gives us the freedom to incorporate all those influences naturally.
Creating contrasts and different atmospheres was something that came very organically during the songwriting process, and those jazz-influenced sections fit perfectly into that dynamic.
Everyone in Abstracted comes from a different musical background, which gives us a very broad range of influences. I think that helps us blend ideas together in a more organic way.

Brazilian metal is usually associated with aggression first, but Hiraeth feels much colder and more introspective than most extreme metal coming from South America. Does where you come from still shape the music strongly?
Absolutely. There’s no doubt about it.
South America has always dealt with deep social and economic issues, and that obviously shapes people’s perception of life. Heavy music can be a powerful way to channel rage and frustration without directing it toward anyone in particular.
But anger isn’t the only emotional response that comes from living in that reality. Introspection, melancholy, and reflection can also emerge from it and I think that’s more where we are now.
We’re not that young anymore, and rage eventually gave way to a different kind of awareness. Something denser, more melancholic, maybe. And I think our music carries much more of that atmosphere today.

There are clear influences here, Opeth, Between the Buried and Me, Vildhjarta, but the album doesn’t feel like worship. Were you consciously trying to move away from sounding like your influences?
I don’t think it was a conscious decision to move away from our influences. As I mentioned before, we have a very wide range of inspirations, and they naturally find their way into the music.
In the end, we were simply trying to create something that sounded exciting and meaningful to us. Of course, bands like Opeth, BTBAM, and Vildhjarta are important references and you can probably hear traces of them in the album, but there were many other influences shaping the process as well — and I think that helped us avoid sounding like a mere imitation.

A lot of newer progressive metal sounds almost too polished emotionally – technically impressive, but hard to connect with. Hiraeth still feels human underneath all the complexity. Was that something you thought about while recording?
Yes, definitely. As part of our pursuit of a more organic atmosphere, we made some very deliberate decisions during both the writing and recording process.
Technical exhibitionism, excessive editing, endless layers of effects — none of that was really our priority this time. We just wanted to create songs that felt emotionally honest and genuinely connected to what we were experiencing.
Looking back now, I think we were basically asking ourselves: “If Hiraeth were an album by another band, would I actually save it to my Spotify library?”
That was the real question behind everything. And maybe we’re simply not drawn to that overly polished, pasteurized kind of sound.

Some of the clean passages on this record feel almost uncomfortable because they appear right after really dense or violent sections. Do you enjoy throwing listeners out of balance a bit?
Yeah, maybe… [hahaha] You know, I have two different images in my mind when I think about tranquility after chaos.
One is the classic idea of calm after a storm: the chaos slowly fades away, the sun comes back out, and everything starts feeling safe again.
But the other image is closer to something out of Melville, like fighting a monstrous white whale that suddenly disappears beneath the surface. Everything becomes silent and still, but instead of relief, there’s tension. You can barely breathe because you know nothing is actually okay. The creature is still there just waiting for the right moment to emerge again and destroy everything. [haha] I think that’s probably what our clean sections feel like. They may sound calm, but there’s still a lot of density and tension underneath.
So yeah, I think you captured that contrast really well. But once again, it wasn’t something we consciously planned; it was simply what felt right for the songs.

The word “hiraeth” itself carries this feeling of longing for something impossible to return to. Where did that idea connect with the band personally?
Well, I think we all carry something in our lives that once made us feel safe and comfortable, a place where we truly belonged. Maybe it’s a single happy moment from childhood, someone important who is no longer here, or just that comforting sense of innocence, when everything seemed possible and we felt protected by something bigger than ourselves.
We grew up and eventually became wiser people, but that wisdom came as a consequence of an entire life struggling through deep issues and feelings of loneliness. Learning how to deal with that while still moving forward on this path of self-development is probably the real ning and beauty of life.
But sometimes we just get tired, and all we want is to feel that again: a place that feels like home, where we can still find warmth and safety. A place where we recognize ourselves and reconnect with our purest essence.
Maybe that’s just a middle-age crisis. [hahaha]

Reviews of the album keep talking about the technical side, but honestly the atmosphere feels more important than the musicianship most of the time. Does it ever annoy you when people reduce progressive music to skill alone?
Annoyed? Maybe not. I think people connect to music through many different aspects, and that feels completely natural to me.
For example, a young guitar player struggling to improve their picking technique will probably pay close attention to the technical side of their favorite bands. I was that guy once too, and that’s a very real kind of connection. It’s part of the process.
So it wouldn’t make much sense for us to play a genre that naturally demands technical precision and then feel frustrated when people notice that aspect of the music.
But at the same time, technicality was never our main goal with Hiraeth. I completely agree with you about the importance of atmosphere. More than anything, we wanted to create songs with layers, music that could offer different points of connection depending on what each listener is looking for emotionally or musically.
And of course, it’s very rewarding to realize people are connecting with the album through many different dimensions beyond just musicianship.

The production sounds much more natural than a lot of modern progressive death metal records now. The drums especially still breathe instead of sounding completely machine-fixed. Were you tired of hearing overedited prog metal albums?
Oh, absolutely! [haha] At some point, a lot of records started sounding almost identical to us. And I don’t think that’s an issue exclusive to progressive death metal — every genre eventually reaches a point where its own aesthetic becomes oversaturated.
Maybe modern metal got there a little faster than expected, and we simply felt the need to move in a more organic direction.
For example, we intentionally kept small imperfections in the performances, used real amplifiers, avoided overly processed and hyper-compressed guitar and bass tones, and tried to preserve the natural sound of the drums as much as possible throughout the mix.
And we’re really happy with how that turned out.

Progressive metal has reached a point where almost every band claims to be “genre-defying”. Do you think the scene sometimes disappears too far into complexity and loses its identity?
Yes, I think that can be a very accurate observation.
Modern metal somehow disrupted the more gradual line of evolution that heavy music used to follow and suddenly introduced a completely fresh way of writing riffs, structuring songs, and approaching rhythm, all with a huge sense of personality.
Naturally, everyone wanted to create something that felt as exciting and distinctive as that.
But maybe that’s exactly where the problem begins. When a musical language has such a strong identity and such a powerful gravitational pull around it, there’s always a risk of becoming trapped by it instead of truly expanding beyond it.

Songs like “The Barren Grave of God” feel emotionally heavier than physically heavy. Do you think emotional weight hits harder now than pure brutality?
For us, definitely.
If I had to describe Hiraeth in a single way, I’d say its emotional core is really the central force behind the entire album.
Even the heaviest songs and the most aggressive passages exist there for expressive reasons, at least from my perspective. The brutality is never just brutality for its own sake, it’s always trying to communicate tension, exhaustion, grief, rage, or other inner states.
And I think that underlying thread is probably what gives the album its sense of cohesion as a whole.

Progressive music used to feel risky because bands sounded unpredictable. Now even chaos can feel formulaic. Is it harder today to genuinely surprise people with extreme music?
Probably, yes.
If your main goal is to become “the next original extreme metal band,” then you’ll probably end up with a huge problem. At this point, music has already explored so many different paths that the obsession with novelty itself can become limiting.
Fortunately, that was never really our concern while making Hiraeth.
We weren’t trying to surprise people or reinvent progressive metal. We were simply writing songs that felt meaningful to us, songs we genuinely enjoyed creating and listening to ourselves.
And honestly, I think that kind of visceral honesty during the songwriting process can sometimes be far more impactful than forcing yourself to come up with an artificial sense of innovation. Maybe the real surprise today is simply making something sincere.

Looking back at the eleven years behind ABSTRACTED, does Hiraeth feel more like an arrival point – or the first album where the band finally sounds the way it was supposed to sound from the beginning?
That’s a very interesting thing to think about.
Honestly, I’m not sure there’s really such a thing as an “arrival point” in this case. If you look back eleven years ago, we were completely different people, different perspectives, different tastes, much less life experience, much less musical experience.
So maybe the version of ABSTRACTED that existed back then sounded exactly the way it was supposed to sound at that moment. The same goes for Atma Conflux. And maybe a few years from now we’ll look back at Hiraeth as some kind of transitional work leading into another phase entirely.
I actually like thinking about it that way.
But at least right now, Hiraeth feels exactly like the album we hoped to create.

Thank you!
And thank you as well for listening to the album so carefully, for your sensitivity, and for such thoughtful observations and questions.

Best regards,

José Consani.

https://abstractedmetal.bandcamp.com
https://instagram.com/abstractedbr
https://facebook.com/abstractedbr

Brent Hinds helped shape one of the most adventurous sounds in modern heavy music by blending sludge metal, southern rock, progressive structures, punk energy, and psychedelic guitar work into something completely unpredictable. His playing style became central to Mastodon’s identity, especially because he approached heavy metal guitar with a loose, improvisational attitude that often felt closer to classic southern rock and fusion than traditional metal. Hinds was born William Brent Hinds on January 16, 1974, in Pelham, Alabama. Before gaining national recognition, he spent years immersed in underground music scenes while developing a guitar style influenced by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin

The post Complete List Of Brent Hinds Bands And Musical Projects appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.