Converse Rubber Tracks x MetalSucks 2015 Preview: Six of Swords

Later this month, ten unsigned bands will visit a Converse Rubber Tracks facility in either Brooklyn, NY, or Boston, MA, where they’ll lay down some jams at one of Converse’s completely free, state-of-the-art recording studios. And as if that wasn’t cool enough, bands at the Brooklyn Converse Rubber Tracks will work with producer Will Putney (The Acacia Strain, Suicide Silence, Exhumed), while bands at the Boston Converse Rubber Tracks will work with producer Kurt Ballou (Converge, High on Fire, Torche). 

MetalSucks held an open application process in July for bands to apply, then Axl and Vince worked with Will and Kurt to choose their five favorite bands for each city. We’ll be previewing each of the selected bands in the weeks leading up to these recording sessions, so you can get a taste of what’s in store for ya! You can check out all the previews so far here. Today, we feature Toronto’s Six of Swords.

Death metal is awesome in and of itself. It’s got a formula that doesn’t particularly need to be fucked with to produce excellent results.

But death metal is also quite malleable, ripe for the fucking with, and sometimes doing so produces equally, if not better, results.

Toronto’s Six of Swords take old-school death metal and infuse it with a whole host of other influences. “Separation at the Seams,” from their 2015 EP Polar Vortex, starts with a vintage Cannibal Corpseian riff before transitioning to an elephants-marching, pseudo-breakdown in the verse while the chorus is pure Morbid Angel. “Lock the Cell” builds on a template of Southern sludge but punctuates that downtroddenness with concentrated bursts of death metal fury before erupting into an all-out ripper. And so on and so forth… not that the parts can all be boiled down to “sounds like X band,” because what Six of Swords have going on is purely their own.

Stream the four-track Polar Vortex below via Six of Swords’ Bandcamp. They’ll record with Will Putney in Brooklyn next week.