(written by Islander)
At the end of this week Time To Kill Records will release a new album by the powerhouse Italian death metal band Across the Swarm. Entitled Invisible Threads, it follows up the band’s 2020 record Projections, and we’re bring all of it to you today.
Thematically, the album is about as dark as you could imagine. In the band’s words, it “explores human degradation, unspoken fears, and wars that ravage not only bodies but also minds” — depredations and agonies reflected in the album’s cover art. The music is intended to be a raw and unflinching musical exploration of those terrible themes.
But it must be said right away that the music is the opposite of gloomy and grief-stricken. Instead, it’s absolutely exhilarating – though equally cold-blooded. The album delivers pulverizing, pavement-fracturing thuggery and technically impressive high-speed ferocity, all of it accompanied by monster-show vocals that add to the music’s many spine-tingling (and bone-smashing) effects. It’s a top-shelf example of explosive and rampaging musical malice that’s exceedingly well-constructed, expertly executed, and very addictive.
Across the Swarm set the stage for the album in deep shadows with “Intravenous,” though its ominous rhythmic pounding and monstrous gasping sound more like the commencement of a frightening ritual than the careful setting of a stage, or (given the song title) maybe like the effects on the monster’s pulse of some dreadful injection.
But if that is the setting of a stage, the band start brutally wrecking it right away with “Vertebrae“. Humongously heavy and cold-hearted, the song rapidly discharges bludgeoning battery and lead-weighted riffing that thuggishly jolts and viciously swarms. The drums sound like a combination of mortar fire and avalanche. The bass mimics subterranean upheavals. The vocals come forth in ugly abyssal gutturals that often bark fast, wild screams, and rabid howls that extravagantly extend, and they never cease to be thrilling.
But the band also repeatedly switch things up, shifting the tempos, causing the music to hulk and heave, to spasm and gnash, to detonate and devastate. There’s lots of fleet-fingered fretwork in the mix as well as head-hooking drum-grooves, but it’s very heavy and belligerent throughout – like it could shake apart the foundations of your abode if played loud enough.
“Vertebrae” turns out to be the real stage-setter for what’s to come. Like that song, the subsequent ones tend to feature pile-driver “physicality” combined with thoroughly vicious riffing, electrifying drum eruptions, and vocals from the bowels of hell. They too display swift changes in speed and riffing, and they too are laced with both percussive patterns and spurts of quasi-melodic fretwork accents (sometimes starring the bassist) that create “catchiness” at the same time as the songs are fracturing the earth and mauling whatever survives.
The pitch-perfect production quality makes the technical skill of all the performers abundantly evident. Somehow, despite the massive, excavating heaviness of the music and the general charging speed of the songs, it’s easy to pick out all the interlocking ingredients that create these sonic war zones, and to appreciate what they’re doing.
Across the Swarm are so frighteningly good at their chosen means of ruination, and so effective at keeping listeners on their toes, that getting eight more songs in basically the same black vein as “Vertebrae” would make for a very pulse-pounding hell-raiser of an album that would be easy to go back to for a regular 34-minute kick of adrenaline. And basically, the songs are in the same vein.
But it turns out that some of them branch out into adjoining veins, spreading the violence and the venom in slightly different ways, some more ruthlessly hammering and physically convulsive, some more red-zone berserk. “Red Waters” manages to do both in startling ways, but the band also expand their palette there by including a phase of dismal and miserable melody and a frightening ambient outro. Moments of desperation and agony also infiltrate “Dry Eyes“, and the closing title song includes some careening punk grooves and blazing chords that sound savagely jubilant in the midst of the ruination — but the song closes in a collage of electronic nightmares.
And with that, we’ll leave you to all the music:
And here’s another statement about the album from the band:
To us, the record represents the fusion of ideas from every band member — distinct “organs” coming together to form a single, unified entity, all connected by invisible threads.
During the songwriting process, we focused on making each riff impactful and structuring every track as a complete “song”, with memorable sections through deliberate repetition. It’s a continuation of the approach we took with Projections, but this time we avoided adding extra riffs simply for the sake of complexity.
This album also marks a new chapter for us, as it’s the first to feature our new drummer, Davide Tomadini. It feels like a fresh start for the band, especially since Projections was toured post-Covid, limiting its full potential to reach our audience. We’re thrilled to bring Invisible Threads to the stage and can’t wait to ignite the passion of death metal fans everywhere!
ACROSS THE SWARM:
Francesco A. Flagiello – Vocals
Marco Lambertini – Guitar
Luca Sammartino – Guitar
Mirco Diana – Bass
Davide Tomadini – Drums
The album’s striking cover art was created by SNEM. Time To Kill will release it on February 21st, on black vinyl, dark red vinyl, digipack CD, cassette tape, and digital formats. They recommend it for fans of: Aborted, Cattle Decapitation, Misery Index.
PRE-ORDER:
https://acrosstheswarm-ttk.bandcamp.com/album/invisible-threads
ACROSS THE SWARM:
https://acrosstheswarm.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/acrosstheswarm
https://www.instagram.com/acrosstheswarm/
No Responses to “AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ACROSS THE SWARM — “INVISIBLE THREADS””