Infant Island has unleashed a new auditory onslaught with their latest single, “Unrelenting.” This dynamic track is a masterful weaving of heavy genres, that continues their boundary-pushing ways. The song appears on Obsidian Wreath, out January 12th on Secret Voice.
Obsidian Wreath, the forthcoming third album from Fredericksburg, VA’s Infant Island, is an album about trudging through the end of the world: where climate catastrophe, the acceleration of capitalist extractive exploitation, the apathy towards social health which has emerged from the pandemic, and an endless stream of ongoing crises too numerable to be named, constantly haunt the edges of our vision, like a rot that sets in on the borders of being. It’s an album about the hopelessness of the slow violent decay of the world, about reckoning with a totalizing, impossible condition of reality which never stops confronting you with the question: how do we continue?
This is the question which Infant Island contends with, a question they meet with fervor, with ferocity, with a determination and clarity marked– sustained, even– by grief. Lyrically, musically, the album shifts between light and darkness, using such tropes and their accompanying affects not in their cliché forms as opposing forces, but as mutually determined states of being which implicate and deterritorialize the Other.
There must be something beautiful that can emerge from something terrible – this kind of impossible hope, an optimism that only emerges only from the condition of absolute pessimism, guides the album’s thematic considerations. Perhaps this impossible faith has something to do with Obsidian Wreath being a pandemic record – written in 2020 but releasing in 2024, the record’s slow birth reflects a force of will which was required to survive a global event which threatened the music industry and the people in it at every level.
This contradictory pessimistic optimism is realized as well in Infant Island’s singular songwriting, which filters Virginia screamo through the melancholic furor of American Black Metal acts like Panopticon and Deafheaven. Obsidian Wreath continues and advances the band’s masterful weaving of heavy genres, combining screamo and black metal with a deft movement between the sweeping emotionality of shoegazing post-metal, the hard-hitting grooviness of new-school grindcore, and the searing feedback of noise rock.
What do you think of their latest single? Looking forward to the album?
