Post Death Soundtrack get under your skin with their darkly soaring new single and disturbingly surreal animated video Burrowing Down The Spine — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
Rousingly powerful and relentlessly heavy, Burrowing Down The Spine is the latest preview of the Vancouver doom metal / post-grunge duo’s upcoming new album Veil Lifter, a tempestuous, 10-track Molotov cocktail channeling of crushing intensity. Following the orchestrated industrial soundscapes of their third album, It Will Come Out of Nowhere, Jon Ireson and Stephen Moore have taken a sharp turn to an unruly organic live sound.
This fresh ‘doom grunge’ approach is driven by those who first inspired them — Alice in Chains, Black Sabbath, Nirvana and The Stooges, as well as artists who are redefining heavy music for a new age — Russian Circles, Windhand, Queens Of The Stone Age and YOB. Sludgy riffs, hardcore fury, hypnotic grooves, and empyrean ambience work in union to conjure a singular affecting vision. Veil Lifter is a relentless charge, capturing the unwelcome outsider mentality of a threatening pack of hyenas.
Thematically, Veil Lifter is provocative, incisive, and wholly uncensored. A rousing invocation of spiritual weaponry. A meditation on mental illness and its underlying prevalence throughout the collective psyche. A bold expression of terrifying realities and a prayer of sorts. Veil Lifter is taken from an Eastern philosophy-inspired phrase, “lifting the veil of ignorance.” The name points to the intrinsic beyond the countless external forms and ideas that mask it. Shamanic visions, shadowy dreamscapes, a scorched Earth, and a relentless drive for solace lead the protagonist to retreat to the icy waters underground before facing the mountain of renewal and unbecoming.
Says singer-guitarist Moore: “Veil Lifter is very much the album I’ve always wanted to make. The album is intended, as all my work is, to be completely uncensored, unashamedly dark, raw emotionally, and therefore, cathartic and freeing. It was literally written from deep within the shadow during nearly impossible times. Isolation, depression, addiction, chaos, burned bridges, health failures, and strangely, perseverance and the resilience of the inner witness. So in many ways, it’s an invocation of protection and spiritual weaponry at a time when it was greatly needed.
“Much of it is written in heavy metaphor and dream language, as I’ve always felt it’s more powerful to paint a picture rather than be overly direct. Ideas from Advaita, the Gita, Zen and philosophers like Krishnamurti find their way into the concepts and lyricism here and there, but for the most part, this is a purely raw album intended to evoke deeply personal emotion, as it was written from a truly dangerous place.”
Adds bassist and producer Ireson: “Steve had amassed a treasure trove of guitar parts that he would send me daily. A lot of slow dirges with some faster hardcore-inspired stuff mixed in. That inspired the new direction for this record. We knew it was going to be a pretty big change ditching all the electronic production stuff we had done on our other records but when you listen to a song like Bridge Burner off of the last album, you can see the direction we were heading.
“The bones of the songs came together very quickly, arranging all the drums, rhythm guitars and some of the bass in two crazy week-long bursts. The album really came to life once we started adding Steve’s great vocal layers, added some fuzzy melodic basslines to move the plot along, and the icing on the cake was bringing in Casey Lewis. He had worked with Steve on several projects before and his intensity, personality, and feel make the record really punch.”
Watch the video for Burrowing Down The Spine above, hear more from Post Death Soundtrack below, and stalk them on their website, Facebook and Instagram.
