As much as black metal has always identified with wild, untrammelled nature, it’s taken its most evolutionary and leftfield leaps when it’s found its muse amongst the labyrinthine dimensions of the modern city. Including former and returning members of Akercocke in their ranks, the South London-based Voices, more than any band to have emerged this current decade, have made a an art of mapping interior trauma to the claustrophobic, frustration-inducing and, occasionally, just really fucking beautiful experience of living in a sprawling metropolis.
Much like their home city itself, Voices’ music has has kept a unique identity through constant transformation, and after their previous album, named, well, London, stretched the boundaries of black and death metal into progressive and potent new dimensions, the band have just given birth to their new monstrosity, titled - with a similar mix of bluntness and spring-loaded resonance - Frightened. Although still writhing with urban paranoia, restlessness and a tantalising sense that some personal holy grail lies buried beneath all the murk, Frightened offers a bold new vision for the band, drawing new inspiration from the furtive, agitated sound of post-punk and gradually wringing something kaleidoscopic from the gloom.
To herald that release, the band are unveiling an immersive and cinematic video for the track Dead Feelings exclusively through Subterranea and Metal Hammer. Shot around London by director Marc Brugere, and with an unrelenting eye for detail that invokes the city as an hallucinatory state of purgatory, this is a journey along foreboding paths into both physical and psychological hinterlands lurking at the edges of rational space.
“By way of Sun Ra, Bergman and Lynch we have arrived at our most ambitious music video to date. We battled heatwaves in underpasses, storms upon the high rises and trespassing the city,” says guitarist Sam Loynes. “We chose Dead Feelings as we believe it represents the new sonic realm we have embraced: melancholy, detached and extreme. Embrace the rain.”
So without further ado, ditch your compasses, set controls for some deeply buried emotional truth you’d probably rather not face right now and lost yourself amongst the enigmatic environs of Dead Feelings below!
Visit Voices' Facebook page here
And order Frightened here!
