The focused sludge rage of STONEBURNER is again revealed this week as Metal Hammer premieres another track from their forthcoming second full-length, Life Drawing.
"An Apology To A Friend In Need" is a seething concentrate of bold leads and restless riffs, annihilatory fuzz and total destruction kept at bay only by the spot-on groove the Portland sludge crew excel at, throwing their monumental weight around with deadly accuracy.
About the track the band remark: "This song is one of our favorite pieces to play. Riding the line between the crunchy, aggressive riffs and the more subdued, fragile sections gets us high as hell. Lyrically, 'An Apology...' is just that. It's a reflection on those times when it takes everything you've got just to get out of bed, with no room left for others. The dark times when you turn your back on a loved one's pain, because all you've got to give is the poison of your own shitty problems."
You can stream all eight minutes of "An Apology To A Friend In Need" AT THIS LOCATION. Direct SoundCloud link can be found HERE.
You can also listen to the sonic severity of "Some Can," premiered last week, and now streaming at The Portland Mercury HERE.
The follow-up to their 2012 debut, Sickness Will Pass, features nine rumbling hymns of bottom-heavy hostility, diseased rhythms and emotional decay as well as an array of talented guest vocalists including Krysta Martinez (Transient/Landmine Marathon), Benjamin Caragol (Burials/Hang the Old Year) and Joshua Greene (Bastard Feast, Ephemeros). Recorded, mixed and produced by Fester at Haywire Studios, mastered by Adam Gonsalves at Telegraph Mastering - both in Portland - and swathed in the visually abrasive cover art of J.J. Shirey, Life Drawing promises to hurl STONEBURNER's habitually chest-caving sludge mantras to entirely new realms of earth-deteriorating heaviness.
STONEBURNER's musical ancestry winds through Buried At Sea, Buried Blood, Heathen Shrine and others. Named after a subterranean weapon from the novel Dune, STONEBURNER delivers a wholly organic orchestration of captivating, crusty doom metal, their torrid hymns bathed in internal agony, anguish and despair.
Life Drawing will be unveiled in North America via Neurot Recordings on April 15th, 2014 (April 14th in the UK/EU).
"Churning elements of sludge, doom and crust in a charred and emotionally charged study of turmoil, fearless self-examination and a determined drive to wring some genuine human essence from the modern-day vale of tears, Life Drawing is a daunting yet ultimately exhilarating album for anyone who believes that music should be as challenging and potentially transformative as life itself." - Metal Hammer
"...a bottom-heavy, cracked, ground-crawling rager dipped in mire and slime." - The Portland Mercury
"At times quite spooky, at others downright teeth-grinding, Life Drawing is rough and seething. Repeated thrusts of your face into the soft moss of a dying log somehow protect you from the obvious: Hope and promise aren't merely stained. They've been properly diluted and washed out with thick piss. The truest of sludge deliveries opens a rusty door, but STONEBURNER have invited us into our own nightmare. The deceptive lounges hardly provide comfort, and you're better off just cooperating when the rhythms crash. Get in the van and stop with the fucking questions. Yes, there IS a world this ugly." - HeavyPlanet
"The songs are free form expressions of the darker side of life where not everything works out in the end. The cover is quite evocative and one can imagine this album chronicling the life and times of the figure in the painting. Which is possibly why the album sounds so bleak, yet with moments of uplift; even in a drab life there are moments of color... " - Wonderbox Metal
For further info on STONEBURNER/Neurot Recordings in North America contact liz@earsplitcompound.com, in Germany contact ansgar@community-promotion.com, and across the rest of Europe contact lauren@rarelyunable.com.
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