AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ANTILLES — “HUMANITY IS CANCER”

Who knows when you may read this and listen to the song we’re presenting? Whenever that day may come, we’re first presenting it on a Sunday, a rare day for premieres at this site. But having heard this new song by the German band Antilles, it was an easy decision to make the rare effort.

The song title proclaims that “Humanity Is Cancer“, a bleak and angry sentiment, but one that’s regrettably backed by mountains of deplorable evidence that shows humankind’s persistent use of the Earth as a sewer, befouling and degrading it in a headlong rush toward what we imagine in our hubris as “progress”, and simultaneously turning the climate into an oven.

Much of that evidence is assembled in the video that accompanies Antilles‘ lyric video, interspersed with footage of the band explosively expelling their disgust and fury through the music.

The song is longer than average, and the band use the time to harness an extravagant array of sensations through a multitude of genre ingredients, including many variants of death metal. At times the music reaches towering heights and sweeps across a scale as vast as the subject matter demands, deploying soaring synths over bunker-busting percussive detonations to create an atmosphere of frightening calamity and bruising sorrow. In one of those episodes, a remarkable guitar solo creates a swirling spectacle of sound.

At other times the song explodes in violent rage as the drums blast in obliterating fusillades and the guitars generate a furnace-like blast-front of searing sound fortified by a pile-driving bass. At still other times, the band surge into a thrashing and thunderous gallop, with the notes flying in maniacal fashion, darting like swallows in flight. And speaking of violent rage, the dual vocal attack is at all times an experience of roaring ferocity.

And so what Antilles have succeeded in doing is creating a track that’s both pulverizing and atmospheric, technically impressive and emotionally evocative, exhilarating and haunting.

This compelling song appears on a new Antilles EP named Entheos, which thematically “addresses the increasing delirium of a human being finding himself in a self-destructive world from which there is no escape. Seeking shelter in divine delusions is recognized as the only way out, which finally results in religious fanaticism”.

Entheos will be released on CD on July 8th via the Cologne-based label The Crawling Chaos Records, and a vinyl release is also planned. Pre-orders will begin on June 17th.

As with its predecessor, The Intricate Path of Creation, the record was mixed and mastered by Sebastian “Seeb” Levermann (Greenman-Studios/Orden Ogan). After playing their first post-COVID shows in early 2022, Antilles tell us they are eager to present their new music on stage in the coming months.

ANTILLES are:
Guitar, vocals: Conrad Meyer
Guitar: Oskar Kowalik
Bass: Niels Luft
Drums: Alex Domke

ANTILLES:
https://www.facebook.com/AntillesOfficial
https://www.instagram.com/AntillesOfficial
https://antillesmetal.bandcamp.com/

THE CRAWLING CHAOS:
https://www.thecrawlingchaos-records.de
https://www.facebook.com/thecrawlingchaosrecords/
https://thecrawlingchaosrecords.bandcamp.com/