Chrome Waves - Earth Will Shed Its Skin (2023)

North America’s finest Post-Black Metal band returns with another brilliantly melancholic and crushing release titled “Earth Will Shed Its Skin”. Featuring six tracks and exactly 42 minutes of misery-inducing music, the band further hones their trade delivering a masterful mixture of melancholy and aggression, paired with bleak atmospherics. If you liked the band’s earlier efforts, this release will be right up your alley as it is more refined and yet maintains the band’s core sound.

Opening with the mellow “Forward”, the band sets a very moody and engaging tempo that is both aggressive and yet catchy, thanks to its weeping guitars and atmospherics. As “Under the Weight of a Billion Souls”, we get additional catchiness mixed in with intricate bass guitar lines, shoegazey passages, and crafty vocal arrangements. The band’s sound is quite dynamic as it weaves back and forth between fast and punishing to introspective and melancholic, as we can hear in pieces like “The Long Rope” and “What Desperate Looks Like”.

Innovating in the Post-Black Metal scene is hard and the band does a fine job in taking up the challenge and creating unique songs full of moody progressions, mixed influences from other genres, and an overall sense of longing and despair. Further pushing the envelope, “The Nail” has a slight Gothic vibe while “Broken” perfectly delivers some Gothic Death Doom vibes thanks to its killer growls and lush instrumentation.

Overall, “Earth Will Shed Its Skin” is one hell of a powerful release that showcases Chrome Waves progression into an even better and more diverse band. All tracks in this release have their individual magic, making them have high replay value as you will discover new things each time. In a genre that has started to ‘all sound the same’ in the last few years, it is quite refreshing that this release combines so many different elements in a very cohesive and demoralizing way.

Label: M-Theory Audio

Release: April 28th, 2023

Genre: Post Black-Metal

Country: USA