Heavy Song of the Week: Immolation Shred Us to Bits with “Bend Towards the Dark”

Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Bend Towards The Dark” from Immolation.

Immolation, New York death metal tyrants, have released “Bend Towards the Dark” from their new studio album Descent, out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

That this song comes 35 years after their studio debut feels unreal, not just because of how long we’ve been (un?)blessed by these legends of the genre but also because of how youthful and violent they still feel all these years on.

Main creative battery Robert Vigna and Ross Dolan, who have appeared as lead guitarist and bassist/vocalist respectively on every studio release, are as strong as ever, producing material that seems not to have aged a single day. They continue to ply their trademarked tunneling tremolo riffs along with those quite jazzy chord voicings that have become synonymous with the group.

In a world where we sometimes see acts of yesteryear struggle to maintain the same level of quality of their golden years, watching death metal musicians match the same seemingly time-defiant heights of jazz greats is as bewildering as it is wonderful.

Honorable Mentions:

Apostle – “Illusion of Loss”

What do we call this? Doom? Hardcore? Screamo? Black metal? Regardless, it’s an immensely well-balanced track, keeping slower groove and harmonic development going alongside black metal trem riffing and throat shredding vocals. Apostle showcases that the real power of extreme music lies beyond the genre differentiations and instead lies in the mood, the atmosphere, the attitude. There is rage and pain here peaked to an intensity that becomes triumphant in a perverse way, man becoming animal. Harrowing in the best possible way.

Warning – “Stations”

That Warning has returned at all is itself enough of a blessing; that it is just as good as what they left us with is beyond that. When the UK band stepped away two decades ago, doom was just beginning to enter another golden age, one which has given us bands such as Pallbearer, Khemmis, Elder and more. They return here to a class of bands they had a major hand in creating producing material as good as they’ve ever done it. The music may be intensely melancholic, but the story beneath it is one of the enduring power of great art and great artists. It’s hard not to be overcome.

Spirit Adrift – “You Will Never Hold The Key”

Lush, heavy and intense. Nate Garrett wields his Christian faith across the final Spirit Adrift album not in a proselytizing manner but instead a deeply personal one. You can feel every inch of his struggles for sobriety and the current hardship his family is facing in the performance, which marries an eyes-turned-upward sense of melody against a weighty sense of doom. It’s that bleeding sincerity that makes this, marking it kin to similar mythic confessionalism found as far afield as outlaw country music and the arena-gang choruses of great pop.