New Music Round-Up: New Tracks From Týr, A Storm of Light, Twitching Tongues and Vattnet Viskar
There’s been so much new music coming out over the past few days I’ve barely been able to keep up. And since surely your only source of stellar new music is MetalSucks, you must be falling behind too. Here are a few of the highlights you may have glossed over this week if you weren’t paying close attention to the metalwebs.
Faroe Island folk metallers Tyr will release their seventh studio album Valkyrja via new label Metal Blade in September (order here), and they’ve released the first track from that album for all to hear. On first listen it sounds way less folk metal-y than much of their past work and more just straight-forward metal; if you told me this was a new Trivium track I’d totally believe you (this coming from someone who generally likes Trivium).
A Storm of Light, the brainchild of longtime Neurosis visual collaborator Josh Graham, are back to bring more of the epic doom goodness for which they’re known. I absolutely love the production and mixing on “Fall,” streaming courtesy of Revolver; it’s big and it’s clear, but it retains that rawness that’s so essential to this type of metal. Sonically speaking it reminds me a lot of Mastodon’s Leviathan, and, come to think of it, it’s quite Leviathan-y from a harmonic standpoint as well, just slowed down a tad. Nations to Flames will come out on September 17 via Southern Lord.
Twitching Tongues’ style is indeed hard to pin down, as Decibel scribe Chris Dick posits in his write-up of their new song “World War V.” Of the many bands he name-checks in his attempt to nail it, I hear the most of Life of Agony, Cro-Mags and Celtic Frost; the band’s oveall approach is decidedly rooted in punk, but there are less-than-subtle metal overtones all over the place. The vocals will surely be polarizing, but I’m always a fan of anything that’s not modern-metal-vocals-by-numbers. In Love There Is No Law comes out on August 20th via Closed Casket Activities; order here. Stream the new track exclusively at Decibel.
Black metal upstarts Vattnet Viskar play Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus Bar so often I thought they were from here, but nope, they’re living free [and eventually, presumably, dying] in New Hampshire. Not that that has much bearing on their sound — just a thought — a progressive, transcendental black metal approach akin to what bands like Nachtmystium and Krallice are doing. The band absolutely kills it live, and “Fog of Apathy” — streaming exclusively at Stereogum — is a promising first entry from forthcoming album Sky Swallower. I look forward to hearing more of what the record has to offer when it drops in September via Century Media.
