Wolves in the Throne Room are Back

The last time Wolves in the Throne Room released an album (2011’s Celestial Lineage) was during the tail end of the great North American black metal boom. Since that time the scene has kinda petered out.

Not to take anything away from the band: I quite enjoyed Celestial Lineage (and Black Cascade before it) and those albums would certainly stand as fine pieces of art on their own merits, but the widespread success this band experienced was definitely at least in part a product of the times. The finicky, trend-setting scene that so embraced atmospheric black metal in 2009 seems to have moved onto crustier, doomier bands that are now packing out the Saint Vituses of the world.

So: Wolves in the Throne Room just announced a new album to be released on July 8th, Celestite, an instrumental, experimental companion record to 2011’s Celestial Lineage. Check out this incredibly tantalizing description from a press release:

Celestite sees the band take a deeper excursion into the crystalline synthesizer-driven domains that have long intrigued them. With the aid of producer Randall Dunn, the band unearthed a hidden soundscape that is only loosely tethered to their familiar sound, yet is still unmistakably the work of Wolves in the Throne Room.

I’m super into the fact that the band is actively pushing their sound forward instead of just re-treading the past, and I, for one, can’t wait to hear it. But I wonder what the reception at large will be?

I guess we’ll see. We’ll let you know as soon as there’s some new music to hear. In the meantime, here are some tour dates:

7/11/2014 Capital Theatre Backstage – Olympia, WA
7/12/2014 Shakedown – Bellingham, WA
7/13/2014 The Venue – Vancouver, BC
7/14/2014 Crocodile – Seattle, WA
7/15/2014 Star Theatre – Portland, OR
7/17/2014 Slim’s – San Francisco, CA
7/18/2014 Catalyst Atrium – Santa Cruz, CA
7/19/2014 Che Café – San Diego, CA
7/20/2014 Echoplex – Los Angeles, CA