If you’ve been reading this blog for a while now, the name Aki McCullough should ring a bell. We’ve covered her work extensively over its many manifestations and metamorphoses as part of bands like Dreamwell, Vivid Illusion and A Constant Knowledge of Death. That last one is especially pertinent to our business today since, if you’ll recall, that group’s proclivity for genre experimentation also included a foray into doom and sludge metal, especially on Vol. III.c: Everything Was Possible And Nothing Was True, composed by Aki herself. Apparently, fate would have her revisit the realms of doom as Mike Snow (The Love Team, Seas of Winter, Apricitas) reached out to her to form Necroplanet, a project focused on fully diving into the realms of funereal, blackened, and epic doom with great results. We are so happy to premiere the first single from the project right here. check out “Negative Space” below!
Holy hell. Yeah, “Negative Space” is about right for this absolute slab of crushing, void-filled funereal doom. Snow does amazing work on the drums, injecting them with a sort of Godflesh tinged, metallic tone that does much to fill in the vacuums left by the cavernous, crashing guitar chords. McCullough displays fantastic vocal range on this track, running the gamut from the more abrasive style we’ve heard from her before on Dreamwell and deeper, but no less searing, screams that work incredibly well with the rest of the doom trappings on this track.
Put these elements together alongside excellent compositional work and immaculate production fit for this kind of sound and the overall result is a promising ride and then some, a journey into a cold, heavy, and hostile abyss that channels the derision and despair that funereal doom is so good for. As Snow says:
“Necroplanet started off as my variation on the classic guitarist experiment “what if I turned all my pedals on at once,” and after some tweaking I ended up with a really gnarly tone I liked but that was very limiting in what I could do with it. Since anything other than huge chords ended in a wall of static and noise I decided to write something low, slow, heavy and miserable. I ended up writing and recording all of my parts over maybe a week or two, and then sat on them for a while until I could decide what to do with them. I had originally contacted Aki to just do vocals, but she ended up adding some really phenomenal and ethereal leads that made all the songs much more dynamic and interesting since most of them were based around some very repetitive and slow riffing. In a time when everyone I know feels miserable and hopeless, I really wanted to capture that mood and feeling and between the two of us, I think we were able to.”
Negative Space releases on August 19th and you can pre-order it from the Bandcamp link above. You’d be fools not do so, if I’m being honest.