Heavy Song of the Week: Sigh Transform into Melodic Folk Metal Magicians on “Unputenpu”

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 “Kill Count Increase” from Hatebreed. I would not have anticipated the debut single of Goh-Ka, the newest album by Sigh, to be a melodic folk metal track, but their long career has taught us all that expectation is the enemy when it comes to their music. It feels fitting that Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth provides a guest guitar solo here given how the closing of the song reads like something that would not be out of place on the last three or four Opeth albums — albeit here contextualized with Japanese traditional instrumentation and a pronounced sing-song melodicism that is a pleasant shock. I doubt anyone who’s known of Sigh, who started as a crusty black metal band before metamorphosing into a progressive metal troupe, could have seen them making something so undeniably accessible, but it works so well it almost feels puzzling that they hadn’t before now. The atmosphere of “Unputenpu” calls to mind Turisas, a now-defunct folk metal band that incorporated enough death metal fringes that it transcended t...