Mare Infinitum: The Best New Band You Will Hear Today

The best bands are the ones that completely defy classification. Sure, you can point to specific elements of their sound that might loosely fit into a predefined genre box, but taken as a whole there’s no simple, reductive way you can describe the band’s sound.

Mare Infinitum are one such band, and I’ve been completely hooked ever MS Mansion indentured servant Kelsey introduced them to me earlier this week. There are elements of death metal, doom, prog, sludge, trad metal, shred and goth present in their music, but at no moment does the finished product sound like any one of those. It also doesn’t sound like a jumbled mish-mash of genre tropes: everything works within the context of each song, and it all flows together seamlessly. Earth-shaking death growls right into soaring, Dio-esque highs? No problem. A sludgy doom riff with an epic guitar solo on top of it? Psssh, got it. In short, the whole is much, much greater than the sum of its parts, so much so that Mare Infinitum may have created a genre all their own.

Stream their new album Alien Monolith God below. It just came out this week, and can be purchased on Bandcamp for less than five bucks.

Metal Archives tells me that Mare Infinitum released another full-length in 2011. If any MS readers are hip to that one, holler below in the comments and tell us how this one compares.