AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ALKERDEEL — “LEDE”

When I first gazed upon the cover of Alkerdeel’s new album, Lede, I could’t help but think of the insults hurled by the French guard from his parapet in Monty Python’s best movie: “I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”. Yet the album art depicts a demonic expulsion of foulness rather than a French one. What might this portend, I wondered, especially as the cover for an album by a Belgian black metal band? We have a premiere of a video for the title track that will give you at least a few clues to the answer today, though I think it’s safe to say that those clues will be surprising in themselves.

This new album is the band’s third and comes roughly four years after their last one, Morinde, with some spit releases filling the gaps in the interim. For those of you familiar with Morinde, those passing years have produced some changes in Alkerdeel’s sound, as you will discover through this new video.

The rumbling, tumbling beat of the song will get its hooks in your heads fast, just as the dirty, swarming riffs will begin the process of scrambling the brains inside them. With a deranged howl, the band segue into a head-battering, head-bobbing riff (yes, the song does all sorts of things to your head). It’s a piston-driven, smoke-belching, steamroller that just gets more crazed as it moves ahead. The vocals get more crazed, too, with a mix of searing howls and shrieks that spawn images of an asylum inmate trying to sink his teeth in your throat.

It’s a wicked, trippy piece of music, coated in grime, stinking of sulphur, and as vicious as a rabid wolfhound. It’s also as highly infectious as it is highly poisonous. And as you’ll witness in the video, it succeeds in making an already creepy film clip even creepier. You may have to reorient your thinking about the significance of the album’s cover art after you get your head bent by the video.

Lede will be released by Consouling Sounds on April 15

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