You probably know what to expect from a band called Blood Incantation: pulverising blast beats; jagged, discordant riffs; vocals seemingly sourced from the killing floor of an abattoir. And, by and large, you’d be right. For most of the acclaimed Coloradan death metal band’s career, that’s been the playbook (give or take some intriguingly psychedelia-tinged detours). But for their new album, Blood Incantation have drastically changed tack. Timewave Zero bins off the aforementioned growling and howling for a pair of ambient “suites” – moody, droney synth tracks that, while not “heavy” in the traditional sense, retain an air of menace and foreboding. “Now that we’ve proven we can do both metal and ambient, we’re totally free to just be Blood Incantation,” the band told the Guardian.
Blood Incantation aren’t the only band to have embraced less punishing textures in their music of late. Deafheaven, previously purveyors of “blackgaze”, a skyscraping mix of black metal and shoegaze, abandoned the former bit of that portmanteau on their most recent album Infinite Granite, a collection of rather pleasant, largely mid-tempo dream-pop songs. And even the bands that aren’t entirely casting off their brutality seem to be dabbling in surprising sonic textures these days. You can hear it in the Warp Records-esque glitches that pepper Code Orange’s brilliant, bruising alternative metal, the sinister synthscapes of the otherwise relentless metalcore act Vein.fm, or the woozy excursions with Dev Hynes, AKA Blood Orange, from backflipping hardcore heroes Turnstile.
