Track Premiere: Ray Suhy, “Cerulean”

MetalSucks readers might not know Ray Suhy by name, but they should be well familiar with his work: as the guitarist of beloved New Jersey-based prog-metallers East of the Wall, we’ve been raving about his playing for years and years. Suhy has also spent time with Six Feet Under and Cannabis Corpse, so even if you’re not an East Coast metal diehard you’ve surely heard him play before.

“Cerulean,” a song from his forthcoming solo EP we’re premiering here today, shows a different side of Suhy than EotW fans might be expecting to hear. It’s still instrumental, and it’s still proggy — he even initially pitched it as a song for EotW — but it’s at once more straight-forward metal and outside the box prog than what you’d expect from that outfit.

Ray tell us:

“‘Cerulean’ was the first song I wrote for Fulmination. It started off as an exercise where I limited myself to only 4 notes (A,B,C and E) and tuned my guitar (low to high) AADGBE. I came up with the main riff this way and then deviated a bit from the limitations when I wrote the other sections. Victor Montanaro [drums] really kills it on this song. He effortlessly plays through all shifting time signatures of the main riff and really drives the song. I originally pitched “Cerulean” to be an East Of The Wall song but that never panned out. After it sat for a while I decided to turn it into an instrumental and it really set the tone for the E.P. A link to a free PDF tab file of the intro and main riff is available in the video description.”

Check out below and see what you think. Fulmination comes out on June 16th via Cessation Engine Records; pre-order here.