ABSORB Hold Your Head Under the “Smog” With A Heavy Doom Grip

Bands like to talk a lot of SHIT about how heavy and brutal they are, so much so that ‘heavy’ and ‘brutal’ are highly cliched words in metal and its bands’ hype cycles. It’s challenging to peruse a statement on an upcoming album or about a band in general and not see either of those words used – turn it into a drinking game if you want a trip to get your stomach pumped. They evoke specific feelings to many, but their overuse and frankly misuse by some bands really sours me on them more often than not. I’m not impressed anymore – show me you’re heavy!

Heavy is as heavy does though, and ABSORB are pretty damn heavy. Being a band from Hamilton, Ontario may not be the giveaway for most, but once you hear the music, you wonder if the gravity’s different up there in Canada. The doom five-piece are looking to smoke us out with Smog, their new EP coming out officially on Friday, July 26 via Hypaethral Records, but we’re looking to show it off a day ahead of time and hopefully throw off the planet’s gravitational field ever so slightly. Listen to Smog‘s three songs right below.

See what I mean? From the magnificently sundering cover to the pummelfuck of the instrumentation on this EP’s 25 minutes, there’s not really a safe place to turn when ABSORB are involved. Things are dangerous, yet alluring – Smog occupies that morbid curiosity space where you feel compelled seek out and engage with something that you shouldn’t. From the eruptive first song to the cataclysmic finale, this is a chubby project, rife with scalping riffs, neck-stomping drumming, and acidic vocals.

“Dissociated” is anxious, verbose in the ways it wishes to tear you apart physically and mentally. The vocals especially are grated and callous, calling forth a bit of Primitive Man, a band they boldly and correctly compare themselves to in terms of weight. The guitars are deep and crunchy, achieved by having both a rhythm and lead guitarist to cover multiple bases. ABSORB try, and mostly succeed, to outdo themselves on the sludgy core of the EP in the form of the title track. You can feel traces of melodies that Windhand would wield, just evil and used to beat your ass instead of entrance. There’s some death metal swing to them as well which coagulates the rest of the song into an igneous mass too large to quantify.

Then “Cecilia” slowly rolls it over your grape-like body until it pops. This song is slooooooow in a profoundly powerful way. It really takes its time bowling you over, molten lava leaking out to galvanize your shrieking body. This is probably my favorite song on the EP because of how deliberate it is and how it showcases ABSORB as the unyielding monolith they are. While their music is darkly atmospheric, don’t for a second believe this motherfucker lets up at any point. Smog is constant, ceaseless, and cavernous – any lessening of intensity should be viewed not as a boot releasing its weight from your head in respite, but simply that boot recalibrating its aim to come down harder next time.

Big shoutout to all involved for allowing us the opportunity to experience this project firsthand, and to premiere it for the rest of y’all. You can fund your own sonic death by preordering Smog on Bandcamp digitally, vinyly, or CDly. Follow ABSORB into hell via their Instagram and Facebook. It drops elsewhere tomorrow, July 26 via Hypaethral Records.

Band photo by Brittany Vaughan