GRADIENCE have released the video for "Undone", the latest look at "Anomaly", the Danish band's debut full-length, arriving September 4 via Metal Blade Records.
Vocalist Gavin Mistry describes the song as an argument against silence. "'Undone' is about not keeping my negative thoughts unspoken — about saying them out loud when I'm trapped in a dark thought pattern," he says. "It's about realizing you don't have to deal alone with finding and fixing all your flaws but allowing your friends and loved ones to be there for you. To let them help you and not stand in the way of others helping you navigate your negative mind."
"Anomaly" takes the usually firm border between apocalyptic, sludgy blackened death metal and dark urban trap-rap and pulverises it. Emotive, disarmingly intimate vocal lines blur the lines further, set against a sound picture heaving with glacial synths and hypnotic detail. It may unsettle anyone who prefers their genres clearly labelled — but at the centre of the record is something straightforward: a friendship.
That friendship began in 2022, when Mistry and guitarist Jakob Lærke Harris met at a Copenhagen show by local deathcore heroes CABAL. Mistry had been signed to Sony in Denmark with his "grunge/rock/trap duo" KXDS, a project the pandemic stopped in its tracks, and before that he had come up through an underground hip-hop label and collective. "I had gained a little performance experience and was known as the authentic trap-rapper with emotional and melodic bits," he says.
Harris recognised a kindred spirit immediately. "It was an immediate musical and creative match," he says. "I admired Gavin's vivid lyrics and his ease, switching between delicate melody lines and hard flows; it just opened so many doors to explore in the songwriting process."
The result runs on genuine planets-aligning energy: the turbulence of Harris's extreme metal growl finding new context beside Mistry's rhythms and rhymes, with drummer Frederik Kjelstrup Hansen and bassist Patrick Petersen hammering underneath.
The German press has already come around. Metal Hammer Germany, in an advance review, wrote that "with a skillful blend of rap, metalcore, and black metal, the quartet goes a step further than well-known rap metal acts and weaves dark, atmospheric black metal riffs into trap beats and powerful breakdowns." Rock Hard Germany added: "The raw power of the guitars and double bass meets hard-hitting flows, emotional melodies, and hypnotic electronic elements. In terms of quality, GRADIENCE can easily hold their own against the bigger names in the genre."
"Anomaly" arrives on CD, LP and digital.
"Anomaly" track listing:
- Vermin
- Blame Me
- Agony
- Master To The Slave
- Stains
- Deathwish
- Slow
- Undone
- A Witness
- White Noise
- Grimey Potential
GRADIENCE: Gavin Mistry — vocals; Jakob Lærke Harris — guitars, vocals; Frederik Kjelstrup Hansen — drums; Patrick Petersen — bass.
Pre-orders are available at metalblade.com/gradience.