Insomnium Unveils Haunting New Track The Hour Grows Late

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.

Insomnium is a band that makes melodic death metal work, and their new single “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 without pretense, feeling as natural in each shift as a chord change in another song would be.

Insomnium’s Sound

Insomnium are past the point of needing to reinvent their sound, with each album in the wake of their masterpiece Winter’s Gate being another excursion to map the edges of what their current approach is capable of. Here, the rich folk metal infused with melodic, extreme, and progressive elements calls to mind their fellow countrymen in Moonsorrow. Fall is a time of melancholy and introspection and Insomnium deliver on this necessity. It’s our Heavy Song of the Week.

Honorable Mentions

King Buffalo – “Vagabond”

It has long been said that, left alone for long enough, proggy heavy rock bands will reinvent Rush from first principles. So it is here, with King Buffalo delivering a riff worthy of Counterparts, the criminally underrated ’90s Rush record. The key difference is that instead of using choruses for contrasting energy, King Buffalo leans into the desert rock mentality of repetition over everything, letting a psychedelic heft overtake the song as they layer more and more on top of an already killer groove.

Liminal – “Hyper Normal”

The title track from Liminal’s third album, out today, is a perfect encapsulation of what makes this young psych-prog band so exciting. The same fearlessness that drove the more bizarre wing of early psychedelia like the killer cut “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers is present here, with strange time signatures and trippy vibes melted hot against the level of groove we expect today from King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

Tantric Bile – “Nailed to the Caucasus”

This song is quite simply blisteringly insane. A ferocious cacophony of flutes, blastbeats, gurgled vocals and strains of contemporary classical music at war with free jazz, “Nailed to the Caucasus” off of the new Tantric Bile record Pyrphoros out this week is a brilliant example of the outer limits of heavy music. Tantric Bile is another project from Matt Stephens, the same wunderkind behind similar avant-garde groups like Detritivore, Neural Indent, and his most acclaimed, Effluence.

In conclusion, this week’s Heavy Song of the Week is Insomnium‘s “The Hour Grows Late”, a progressive and mournful song that showcases the band’s unique sound. The honorable mentions include King Buffalo‘s “Vagabond”, Liminal‘s “Hyper Normal”, and Tantric Bile‘s “Nailed to the Caucasus”, each representing a different aspect of the heavy music genre. These songs demonstrate the diversity and creativity of the genre, from the melodic death metal of Insomnium to the experimental sound of Tantric Bile.

Pixel P. Snarkbyte

Pixel P. Snarkbyte, widely regarded as the “Shakespeare of Sh*tposts,” is a video game expert with a unique knack for turning pixels into punchlines.

Born in the small town of Respawn, Pennsylvania, Pixel grew up mashing buttons on an ancient NES controller, firmly believing that “blowing into the cartridge” was a sacred ritual passed down through generations.

Pixel P. Snarkbyte: proving that life, much like a buggy open-world game, is better with a little lag-induced chaos.