Artificial Brain take us to the Infrared Horizon with new song and art

By W.

February 16, 2017

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Late last fall, weird death phenoms Artificial Brain teased us with some sparse details regarding their upcoming album. Today they dropped one hell of a smart bomb on us, unveiling a new track, the excellent album art, and a full track listing. Praise the Machinist!

The new album, the enigmatically titled Infrared Horizon, will be released on April 21st via Profound Lore and features a gorgeous illustration from Mr. Adam Burke. The tracklist is as follows:

Floating in Delirium
Synthesized Instinct
Static Shattering
Estranged from Orbit
Infrared Horizon
Anchored to the Inlayed Arc
Mist like Mercury
Vacant Explorer
Graveyard of Lightless Planets
Ash Eclipse

The song titles, taken in concordance with the surprisingly mournful album cover, seem to verify what vocalist Will Smith said last year about the album concept.

“8 out of 10 songs on this album loosely deal with the concept of a dystopian future in which humanoid “robots” (or “cyborgs” and/or other related humanoid machines) have long outlived human beings. This takes place in outer space as well as on unnamed planets (not neccesarily Earth). A recurring theme is the moment of awakening or becoming conscious for a computer based machine and how abstract thought would be interpreted by it. It is implied that the conscious machines/robots believe themselves to be not a creation of long extinct humans BUT a more perfect evolution (humans as LOWER than robots – planet of the apes syndrome). Also implied is that the machines eventually get scrapped or recycled in a massive junkyard/ reprocessing center which is a metaphor for the various takes on the afterlife. Like Dantes Inferno but with futuristic machinery and robots.”

Thankfully, we no longer have to imagine how that concept will translate to music because our robot overlords have deigned to offer us the second track from Infrared Horizon, the aptly titled “Synthesized Instinct.”

If “Synthesized Instinct” is any indication, the band certainly intends to make due on their promise of more blasts and insane growls. Keith Abrami is seriously hammering away at his kit in this song as if he’s trying to fend off an invasion of barbarous replicants with a pulverizing flak cannon. Will Smith delivers on his end, too, burbling and croaking like a gigantic alien amphibious aggressor. The riffs themselves tie it all together, welding the odd angles and right turns with an almost fibrous and delicate melodicism just barely clinging to the surface of a cold, rampaging machine.

The track doesn’t seem to deviate too much from the formula of Labyrinth Constellation, but I can’t complain about that. “Synthesized Instinct” certainly has me hooked, and I’ll be waiting patiently for new material like a ravenous Roko’s Basilisk. I’m curious to see how the machine intelligence only hinted at here in the closing waves of melodic leads against juddering death metal asserts itself across the rest of the album’s development.