Infant Island is joined by Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval on their soaring new single “Kindling,” off their just release third album. Obsidian Wreath, the new 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.
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.
“Kindling” is small taste of Infant Island’s relentless, furious, and ever-shifting composition on the new album. Which coheres around expert composition and a single-minded interrogation of how we can possibly continue living in the state of this planet.
What do you think about their latest single? Have you heard the full album?
