Album Premiere: Afterbirth – In But Not Of
Death (re)Invents Itself
When we last heard from Long Island’s Afterbirth they had hurdled headlong into a “Black Hole Kaleidoscope” with Four Dimensional Flesh, a mold-breaking album of astrally-projected brutal death metal easily among 2020’s best metal releases (at a ”Minimum Safe Distance”, mind you.)
Now 3.5 years later Willowtip Records has received a cryptic transmission from our favorite 4th-dimensional space travelers entitled In But Not Of, and it is with great pleasure that we share this enigmatic communication with you today. Engage the play button below and get quantum-entangled with Afterbirth’s latest brutal emanation from beyond spacetime:
As hinted at by the album title, Afterbirth’s signature brutal death metal has reappeared, yet has returned to us apart. Inexorably altered and alien, despite its origins as one of the progenitors of said subgenre. Familiar tropes and trappings materialize in the album’s first side, only to morph and contort themselves in a frenzied evolution. By the time we reach the spacious drum beats and synths of album midpoint “Hovering Human Head Drones” it’s clear Afterbirth now exist in some incomprehensible, manifold shape—horrifying in its implications, but utterly captivating to behold.
Guitarist Lead Hovering Human Head Drone Cody Drasser offers up the following diagnostic report on Afterbirth’s continued evolution into forms unknowable on In But Not Of:
At the core of Afterbirth beats the heart of a brutal death metal band. We’re not trying to shed that skin here. In fact, that’s a tremendous honor to carry, and we’re more than proud of our historic origins. But we’ve been a band for about 30 years now and time has taken us to new places, shown us new things and opened us up to aspects of life not previously felt in our earliest incarnation. It would be fruitless to deny we are not the same people today as in the beginning. A disservice to our growth as humans in a complex universe. In that way, it’s seemingly impossible to not carry our musical creations further afield than ever before. It’s how we’ve ended up here, and putting out an album like In But Not Of makes total sense when viewed in that light. It honors our past and unabashedly pushes us forward, into new realms of possibility.
Don’t worry. If all of this seems like a lot to take in there will be “Time Enough Tomorrow”.
In But Not Of drops this Friday (10/20/23) via Willowtip Records.
