Twenty-two years ago, a band called diSEMBOWELMENT released an album called Transcendence Into The Peripheral, widely considered to be one of, if not the, best death-doom album of all time. Transcendence never received a follow-up, with the band breaking up the same year it was released, and so the project dissipated entirely, leaving many fans brokenhearted and aching for more. All four members went on to become part of various side projects, like death metal band Abramelin and the tribal ambient duet Trials of the Bow, but nothing of the same profoundly moving measure, or even of the same genre, ever came again from the illustrious quartet.
Until now, that is: two of those members went on to form Inverloch in 2010, peddling once more in the same death doom style that originally garnered them attention, and made huge waves in the international community with their 2012 EP, Dusk | Subside. They’ve got an upcoming release now, an LP coming this year called Distance Collapsed, and upon hearing the first track from it, premiered over at Decibel Magazine, it’s easy to see that this one is going to be a doozy.
The song, “Distance Collapsed (In Rubble)” is a monolith of a track, clocking in at a solid eight minutes (not exactly long for the genre, but certainly not short), and what Inverloch brings to the table here is worth the attention of any doom metal fan. Channeling the genre’s greats (themselves included), their riffing is simultaneously sublime and grim, ferocious and flighty in equal measure: blast beats and tremolos give way to spectral leads and funereal, drawling vocals, fast, high-tempo sections freeze into glacially slow, crushing riffs at the drop of a hat, and all the while, the song continues to move forward, torpedoes be damned.
“Distance Collapsed (In Rubble)” shows a group of musicians ready to lunge to the forefront of their scene, a juggernaut chasing down anything that stands in their path to success. I, for one, am excited to hear this whole album, and to see the triumphant return of such fantastic musicians to their native genre. Hear the track here, and preorder the album here.