New album, “New Heaven”, out on April 26th!
New Heaven, INTER ARMA’s latest album, is a compelling testament to perseverance, top to bottom. Its thick with dense layers of doom, death and black metal and occasionally let bits of light slip in, fleeting reminders to keep going amid the tumult.
The new album marks a sharp turn for the band, showcasing some of the most extreme and angular songwriting INTER ARMA has ever laid bare. Known for their cinematic take on sludgy, extremely cavernous and borderline psychedelic metal, the Richmond band broadens their dynamics by seesawing between piledriving momentum and swirling oblivion. New Heaven illustrates what INTER ARMA can truly be.
Take the title track, with its hair-raising lead riff stemming from drummer/songwriter T.J. Childers’ challenge to himself to write a nonsensically dissonant part that he ended up loving. The song spirals upward into a punishing death metal march, Meanwhile, vocalist Mike Paparo’s stentorian bellows the bludgeon, above an impossibly complicated web of riffs and rhythms. From the get go, New Heaven and the opening title track show INTER ARMA is unchained.
Paparo’s keen and empathetic lyrics about innocent victims of war, addiction and social apathy affirm that feeling, as a survivor grimaces at the carnage behind him and presses ahead best he can. “You stared into the brutish jaws of strife’s heartless device,” he growls into a chthonic blitz during “The Children the Bombs Overlooked,” a late-album powerhouse. “And you turned your back to hell.” That forward march out of madness is New Heaven in an armor-plated nutshell.
Though this is another INTER ARMA triumph, it is not an album meant to offer some assurance that everything will be fine. What evidence is there for that, really, either on a record where friends are forced into submission, addiction, suicide, or retreat to a world where suffering remains the lingua franca? This is, instead, a record about enduring brambles and curses and lasting long enough to make something profound, honest, and even affirming about it all every now and again – exactly as INTER ARMA has on New Heaven.
(Photograph by Jonah Livingston)
