Back in 2016 we gave a lot of attention to the roll-out of tracks leading toward the release of Wastewalker’s debut album, Funeral Winds, culminating in a review by our own Andy Synn which praised the band for “blending a punishing backbone of deathly heaviness with an esoteric mix of unusual technical twists and fret-sparking leads.” And now this group of Sacramento stalwarts, whose line-up includes current or former members of Conducting From the Grave, Alterbeast, and The Odious Construct, have completed a new album. Entitled Lowborn, it’s set for release on May 12th.
So far, the band have released a lyric video for one song from the new album (“The Moth“), and today we’re presenting a second one — “Vengeance of the Lowborn“.
Wastewalker recommend the new album for fans of The Black Dahlia Murder, Revocation, Unearth, Death, and At The Gates, and each of those names provides hints about what you’ll hear on this new song.
Lyrically, the track seems fitting for our current times. Although its sci-fi-themed narrative is about poor people exposed to radiation sickness and left to sicken and mutate outside enclaves of the high-born barricaded against them, its dystopian tale of the abandonment of “the lowborn” by the rich, and the resulting rage and revenge, doesn’t seem so far-fetched right now.
Musically, the song is a full-throttle rush that harnesses crazed fretwork mania, jolting and ravaging riffs, melodies that are both swirling and feverish, drumming that hammers and spits bullets at high velocity, boiling bass tones, and a high-low vocal tandem of barbaric roars and skin-splitting shrieks that eject the words at a pace that rivals the instrumental pyrotechnics.
The combined effect of all this is to create an atmosphere of electrifying insanity, and the scintillating solo that closes the song in front of a spine-jolting groove is mesmerizing, but the band also succeed in infiltrating this exuberant tech-death mayhem with seductive melody and anchoring it with compulsive rhythms.
Lowborn is available for pre-order now, and we’re also including the video for “The Moth” so you can get a further taste of what these guys have pulled together for this new record.
PRE-ORDER:
http://www.wastewalker.bigcartel.com
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