Exclusive Premiere: Dead Empires, “True Believer”

This past summer, the editors of MetalSucks hand-picked ten unsigned bands from an open application process to record at Converse Rubber Tracks — Converse’s completely free, state-of-the-art recording studio — in either Brooklyn, NY with producer Will Putney (The Acacia Strain, Suicide Silence, Exhumed), or Boston, MA, with producer Kurt Ballou (Converge, High on Fire, Torche). In the weeks leading up to the recording sessions, we previewed each band, and over the past couple of weeks we’ve been premiering the finished tracks from all ten! Today, we feature Kingston, NY’s Dead Empires.

Watching a band grow over time can be an incredibly rewarding experience. We’ve been covering Dead Empires for nearly three years now, and watching them morph from talented up-and-comers to bonafide metal heavyweights has not only been rewarding… it’s been hella fun!

I’m always at a loss as to how to describe Dead Empires’ sound. They’re instrumental, that part’s easy. But they’re equal parts post-metal, prog, stoner, psychedelic and sludge. Most importantly, they blend all these seemingly disparate elements into a whole that doesn’t sound the slightest bit scattered; it totally works. So where does that leave us? I don’t even fucking know. How about just “good,” is that enough?

The band’s performance on “True Believer,” which they recorded with Kurt Ballou at CRT Boston, is their best to date. They sound even tighter and more focused here than they did on their Secret Snakes, Silent Serpent album, which only came out this past January (stream here). Check out the track below.