Listen: Immortal Bird’s Absolute Abscess

In 2015, it’s with a lot of embarrassed amusement that we view interview footage from the ’60s and ’70s. Back then, “rock star” was a novel new job title, and this provided the basis for most questions posed by our predecessors in music journalism to Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and so on. “What do you want out of this, Ringo?” “Mr. Dylan, how long do you expect to do this?” “Mick, what are your career plans for after the Rolling Stones?” and so on. Super lame questions, and even less functional when repeated at dozens of successive press events. They might as well be asking, “Hey, are we annoying you enough?” Ugh.

Since those days, the profession of music journalist has come a long-ish way, but we at MetalSucks might behave just like a stereotypical bespectacled square with a press card in our hat band if ever in the presence of Immortal Bird, an unknowable and awesome blackened sludge quartet that we’ve been watching since 2013’s Akrasia EP. Even membership in an extreme metal band is totally bereft of mystique, and yet to Immortal Bird we’d be posing the most basic Golden Age questions: the origin of their name, how it was selected, is a 31-minute album truly a “full-length,” do they listen to Mínus, how did they get so awesome, do they wanna hang out, etc. That’s an accomplishment. Crank it up!!

Immortal Bird’s debut album Empress/Abscess is out Friday via Broken Limbs. Get it here and here.