As we wrote at time of our last premiere for this Roman band two years ago, in genre terms they were hard to pin down. At the time of that 2018 release (an EP named SVNTH) one could tick off references to black metal, post-rock, and Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelia, with a nod toward experimental flourishes — and you could also hear ambient sounds and folk-oriented digressions with a dark cast.
As we observed then, just making a list like that might make you think of a juggler feverishly trying to avoid dropping any of the multi-colored spheres he’s whirling through the air, but Seventh Genocide (who have begun shortening their name to SVNTH) made their amalgamation of myriad influences sound effortless. All those changing colors weren’t distracting; they just made the music more engrossing.
Which is one reason why we’ve been so curious to see what they would do on their next release. That next release turns out to be an album named Spring in Blue, which will be released by Transcending Records on August 28th. The band have previously released a first single called “Wings of the Ark“, and today we present a second one — “Erasing Gods’ Towers“.
Photo by Void Revelations
Rather than try to list the stylistic ingredients in this new song we’ll instead try to preview the gradually accreting sensations over its significant length. The music seems to wail and mournfully murmur like spirits who have lost their way in a shimmering desert world. Those lonesome laments unfold into a momentum of neck-snapping beats, raking chords, and high, harrowing shrieks. The sense of bewildering grief flows through in rippling arpeggios and intensifies through anguish into despair as the drumming begins hammering and the guitars sear in boiling waves.
The flickering lead guitar that surfaces when the drummer rocks the listener seems to channel a feverish yearning, but the jolting chords and scorching vocals sweep away such fervent hopes, and leave us again in that lonely desert, wandering and bereft. There is one last fiery surge in intensity that hits damned hard and flares in a display of sweeping and immersive extravagance.
It’s an emotional powerhouse of a song, and one that may leave you shaking yourself to regain a sense of your own time and place. And definitely also check out the video for the previously released song “Wings of the Ark“, which features Marco Soellner (Klimt 1918) as the clean vocalist. It was filmed while the band were in New York recording the new album, and the music reveals other dimensions of SVNTH‘s music. The clean vocals enhance the sensuous and romantic aspects of the song, but its introspective and dreamlike countenance is balanced by surging, heart-pounding intensity.
Spring in Blue was recorded at Colin Marston’s Menegroth: The Thousand Caves in New York. The cover art, drawn by Reuben Sawyer (Chelsea Wolfe, Deafheaven) and colored by Ebe Paciocco, is a tribute to a 2001 anime called Digimon Tamers, and the topics on the album were also inspired by the ones present in that series.
To find out how to acquire the album, keep an eye on these locations:
SVNTH:
https://www.facebook.com/seventhgenocide
https://seventhgenocide.bandcamp.com/
TRANSCENDING RECORDS:
https://transcendingrecords.com