“We get put on really weird bills,” says Exist Immortal drummer Charlie Bines. “Once we were put on after a band where the last song they played was a cover of Little Wings by Jimi Hendrix! We’ve played with a bunch of death metal bands, too. We’re kinda bang in the middle and get put on both ends of the scale.”
Charlie’s summary of his band’s touring habits is a metaphor for the music that the London-based quintet bellow out. Inhabiting a land somewhere between melodic metalcore and experimental rock, they’re a unique entity, proficient in both the harsher and cleaner poles of the heavy spectrum.
“It’s nice to have responses from people saying, ‘I’ve never heard anything like this!’” adds lead singer Meyrick de la Fuente. “It varies, and it depends on the town as well. London, it’ll be the tech-savvy fans. That’s our scene, so the tech fans will come out, but in other towns, it’ll be people more into melodic metalcore bands.”
“We get a lot of, ‘It’s really nice to hear a band with clean vocals for a change!’” chimes in Charlie. “It’s quite nice to not fit in with the bands on the rest of the bill – it makes you stand out even more.”
And stand out is precisely what Exist Immortal have done. Since their inception, they’ve unleashed one EP and two full-length studio albums. The latest, Breathe, dropped at the tail-end of 2016. Filled with glorious harmonies and technical riffing, the new record is just as avant-garde as the way in which it was written.
“Most of it was written at four in the bloody morning!” Charlie laughs. “We’d all go to practice at Meyrick’s old house in his studio in the garden, and he’d go to sleep because he had work the next day, I’d leave because I had work, too, and Kurt [Valencia, guitars] and David [Billote, bass] would sit up till 7, 8 or 9am and write stuff. Most of the initial riffs were written around 5am.”
Exist Immortal will be hitting the road multiple times in 2017, hopefully giving the band’s unique blend of djent and modern melodies some new places to call home, as well as new ears to bless with its brilliance.
SOUNDS LIKE: Heavy prog with a mighty dose of metalcore
FOR FANS OF: Rise To Remain, Voyager, Tesseract
LISTEN TO: Follow Alone
BREATHE IS OUT NOW VIA PRIMORDIAL
