Redress the wrongs you’ve suffered
Distance growing deeper still
For all that hangs upon it
A procession for the death of your will
The UK’s Reliquia boast the kind of name that sounds like it ought to be carved into a crypt wall with a stolen hunting knife, and on their new single Bone and Shale, they make good on that promise with a performance so steeped in graveyard glamour and bodily collapse that you can almost smell the dust rising off the chapel floorboards. This is a band with a feel for excess in the old, righteous sense, where every element is pushed until it glows red at the edges, yet the song never buckles under the weight of its own black coat.
Bone and Shale drags doom metal’s solemn stomp into the badlands of gothic rock and lets the two stalk each other. You can hear the bloodlines clear enough: Fields of the Nephilim in the dust-coated vocal grandeur, The Sisters of Mercy in the low-slung bass drive, the folk, dusk, and decay of and also the trees. a touch of The Mission in the grand ache, maybe even a little of The Cult’s scorched mysticism hanging over the rafters. From those dark legacies, Bone and Shale earns its place as a sepulchral centerpiece. It has scale, drama, danger, and a certain doomed dignity.
Gregg Neville is the ringleader here: one minute, he sounds like he is clawing his way through mud and memory, the next, he lifts into something stately and severe, with that faint Bowie-like gleam and Carl McCoy corrosion giving the song a flash of strange elegance amid all the ruin. Tobias Gray and George Kal lace the track with arpeggiated guitars that circle like carrion birds, then open the gate for those twin-lead harmonies that come charging in with a glorious flash of heavy-metal pageantry. Karim Nashar’s drumming gives the song its spine, steady and forceful, keeping the procession moving even as everything around it seems ready to split apart.
And what a lovely procession of misery it is. This song understands grief as private damage turned outward. The lyrics carry a real sense of spiritual abrasion, of a self being stripped down to raw nerve and then called toward some unseen threshold. The arrangement keeps widening as it moves, letting synths gather like storm weather while the bass locks the track to the earth with iron intent.
A gorgeous black and white video of the band’s live performance is below, filmed by Aidan Jones, Finlay Cronshaw-Hardy, and Kieran Marc at Aatma, Manchester.
Listen to Bone and Shale below and order the single here.
Catch Reliquia live:
- April 4th: The Fenton, Leeds, UK
- May 30th: Rock Metal Camp Festival, France
- July 3rd: The Spinning Top, Stockport, UK
- July 24th: Blaqkholesun Festival, Morecambe, UK
- September 11th: Aatma, Manchester, UK
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