High On Fire, Behemoth, Coheed & Cambria + More

Here is a quick list of some of the new albums dropping today:

Behemoth – I Loved You At Your Darkest

The Polish extreme metal band has continued to evolve, push the envelope further, regardless of what sanctions, fines, or reprisals they may receive in their homeland, or within the metal community. They’ve been seen as one of the premier extreme metal bands for a very long time and have continued to do whatever they want to do.

As evident by the single “Bartzabel” the band is doing what purists may see as blasphemy, they’re evolving beyond the blast beats, and are integrating and layering ingredients into their music that you may not have previously expected.

High On Fire – Electric Messiah

If you loved the band’s previous outings, get ready for what more than one review is pegging as album of the year material, and the band’s best material to date. Singer-guitarist went on to tell Stereogum that Electric Messiah is “the best album we’ve ever done, by far”.

That’s quite a big boast, given the fact that they’re the kind of band whose fans always scream “best album ever” with each one of their releases. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of their music, but I always become a skeptic when I hear people make those kinds of claims.

This album is probably their most refined, yet their heaviest, and most punishing. Case in point, the title track, which is actually an homage to Lemmy.

Coheed & Cambria – The Unheavenly Creatures

After straying a bit with their last album 2015’s The Color Before The Sun, the band is back, fully immersed in The Amory Wars. For those of you that don’t know, every album before The Color Before The Sun was concept albums connected to The Amory Wars storyline.

The band’s 2015 release centered more on personal matters than the arc the band had been working on from the start. The band has consistently flown the flag of prog rock and has managed to turn a lot of people on to the sub-genre, receiving airplay on MTV, WWE, and other radio outlets over the years.

They have easily inserted themselves in a place where fans that weren’t looking for the progressive metal bombast of Dream Theater and Symphony X but were instead looking for something more along the lines of a mixture of My Chemical Romance and Rush.

It is a difficult tightrope to walk when successfully teetering between the classic rock fan base and a much younger audience that’s tuned into the mainstream.  But given the New York band’s hardcore audience, they seem to successfully pull this off.

The Brew – Art Of Persuasion

I wrote about this UK band a short time ago, when the song “Gin Soaked Loving Queen” caught my attention. This is just pure straight-ahead hard rock, it is more along the lines of the 70s variety, and as a result, covers familiar territory that is often traversed by other bands.

What’s cool is the band is really making it their own without, laying all of their cards on the table and flat out giving away their influences, like some of their contemporaries. So it doesn’t sound flat out like Zeppelin, or Sabbath, it’s an amalgam of a lot of things, with the band kind of creating their own brew!

Here are some other albums that come out today, that may be of interest:

Anthrax – State Of Euphoria Reissue

Author & Punisher – Beastland

Ice Nine Kills – The Silver Scream

Article by Victor M. Ruiz of earpeeler, Mars Attacks Radio & Podcast, and Galaxy Of Geeks Podcast.  Connect with him on Twitter:  @vmr907