Hailing from Kalamazoo, Michigan, One With The Riverbed are a band whose music draws upon the essential, elemental forces of life itself. Vibrant, pulsing, agonized and exhilarating it reaches into the very core of those who find themselves engulfed by its gargantuan onslaught, broken open by its emotional power and exposed to its harsh truths and unflinching, penetrative gaze. Corrosive black metal crashes against the monolithic shores of a vast post-metal landscape, the tumbling riffs and ethereal melodies entwine forming something staggering and too colossal to comprehend and yet shot through with intensely intimate emotion – a glorious paradox of scale that has never been more effective than on the band’s imminent second full length album, Succumb.
Beginning with current single, the grand, portentous ‘Infested’, Succumb, gathers you up in its arms and carries you into its rampaging tumult of sound. Within the irresistible torrent you are sometimes gasping for breath, riding the crest of foaming, roaring waves and sometimes absorbed into the shadows and aquamarine twilight beneath the surface, skimming across the silent stones of a secret, submerged world. It’s a thrilling, bewildering, excoriating journey through an array of internal landscapes, dreamscapes and soundscapes. Within the world of ‘Dominion’ heartbreaking beauty emerges tentatively from the raging darkness, stays long enough to bewitch and enchant, then slips away again as suddenly as it arrived, utterly consumed, leaving the listener bereft – the sense of loss tangible. When ‘Purified’ casts you into the still shallows of ‘Adaptation’ you can float upon its reflective, echoing notes gazing at a sky obscured by tears, while vocals ripped apart with desolate emotion flay the layers of experience from your broken flesh. The potency of this collection of songs lies in its sheer emotive force that speaks in a voice both god-like and child-like to the universal hopes and fears within us all; the love, grief, shame and spirit that combine and coalesce in our veins.
From their beginnings amongst the forests and wetlands of their Kalamazoo home in 2017, One With The Riverbed always knew that they wanted to push the boundaries of the post-metal genre, to expand the palette of sounds that were the staple diet of other bands. The searing emotions that raged within their creative spirit demanded dissonance, cried out for soul-scarring textures and the unbridled harshness that black metal could supply…and with Succumb they have reached the overwhelming apogee of that creative vision. Succumb will be unleashed by Dusktone on October 25th – prepare for blinding revelation, shocking transformation and total disintegration…
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