Recommended Album: Infant Island – ‘Obsidian Wreath’

Whatever your definition of it may be, the overlapping territories of screamo and black metal aren’t so much about a particular shape or boundary within their heaviness, but the emotional weight behind them. For the past decade, Infant Island have been adding more of these emo pounds into their music, thus separating themselves merely from aesthetics shared with their Virginian peers and originators pageninetynine and City of Caterpillar to the more modern flare-ups across coastlines in Deafheaven and Portrayal of Guilt that have been offered up to the alter of the void. Obsidian Wreath, the Frederickburg band’s third full-length effort, is outstanding from everything that has come before it in the scene because of how they sonically place a scourge upon mankind’s footprint on this Earth. Decay and the perceived end times by our own hands are recurrent themes throughout the listen, with it being devastatingly funereal of what’s impending. On the way to the end, the band lends kerosene to the fire already burning, charring the surface from various degrees of screamo both cathartically dramatic (“Veil”) and extremely brutalist (“Fulfilled”), towering black gaze (“With Shadow”,) and cold, cratering post-rock ornation (“Kindling”). Bastian vocalist Daniel Kost is no longer writing words inside serrations that serve as warning signs on what the future holds, and rather what will be, yet the epitaph needn’t read so grave, as guitarists Alex Rudenshiold and Winston Givler, bassist Kyle Guerra, and drummer Austin O’Rourke create life from its death, and the presence of an entire community around them — joined by .gif from god’s Andrew Schwartz, members of Greet Death, Malevich, King Yosef, Mikau, Undeath, For Your Health, and more — creates its own optimism from the ashes that there’s a beauty within the fury when you at least go down together. “In the dying of light, I burn / Blinding what you choose to see,” Kost screams. “I was your rage / Watchful from afar.” As the perpetual dark nears, let this be your protection.

Highlights: “Veil”, “With Shadow”, “Vestygian”

Infant Island’s Obsidian Wreath is available now on Secret Voice.

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