Heavy Song of the Week: Insomnium Continue Mournful Path on “The Hour Grows Late”

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 “The Hour Grows Late” from Insomnium. I typically struggle with melodic death metal. It feels often to attempt to split the difference between too many elements and as a result drop the aspects most moving to me about each. Insomnium is one of the bands, however, that makes me incapable of writing the genre off. It helps that there is a strong vein of folk music and doom metal within their sound, giving a richness of pathos that some others of the style lack. They are consistently mournful, evoking the plains of Finland and the complex history of the country with sweeping epics of loss. It helps as well that, truthfully, the death metal elements are exceptionally minor, often being remaindered just to the vocals and even then as but one texture of many. “The Hour Grows Late” is an example of them at their best. It’s a progressive song, evolving through moods and layers, filled with recapitulations of themes and new arrangements of earlier ideas. But, like the great epics of Led Zeppelin, they unfurl wi...