SILVERTOMB have released a video for "Graves In The Sky", the first look at "The Interpretation Of Nightmares" — the album Steamhammer will put out on November 13.
The song came from an unusual place for a band with this lineage. Kenny Hickey wrote it on acoustic guitar and piano rather than on an electric, and the arrangement keeps the evidence: acoustic guitar and strings layered against distorted guitar and piano, a texture that sits some distance from the riff-first approach you would expect from the people involved.
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Those people: Hickey on vocals and guitar, formerly of TYPE O NEGATIVE and DANZIG; Johnny Kelly on drums, also of TYPE O NEGATIVE; Joe James on guitar, ex-AGNOSTIC FRONT; Hank Hell of SHEER TERROR on bass; and Aaron Joos on guitar, keyboards and vocals. Between them that is Brooklyn goth-doom, New York hardcore and a good deal of the city's musical history in one room.
Hickey has been candid about why the gap between records ran as long as it did. "Our hands were suddenly tied for years due to the pandemic and its aftermath," he said, adding that he had "a drinking problem that urgently needed sorting out." That is a more direct accounting than most bands offer for a delay, and it sets up an album titled "The Interpretation Of Nightmares" as something other than a genre gesture.
The record runs eight songs: "Brain Matter / No God", "Ascension", "Graves In The Sky", "You Know", "Prayer For The Paranoid", "Distorted", "No Way To Live" and "When Will You Learn?"
SILVERTOMB formed in 2017 and released "Edge Of Existence" in 2019. The comparison to TYPE O NEGATIVE is unavoidable and only partly useful — Hickey and Kelly played on every record Peter Steele made, and the gravity of that band is audible here, but SILVERTOMB have never tried to be a continuation. The keyboards are doing different work, the tempos are less glacial, and the humour that ran underneath TYPE O's whole catalogue is not the operating principle.
"The Interpretation Of Nightmares" is out November 13 through Steamhammer.