With Deftones releasing a new album recently, maybe your satisfaction with it and desire for more has spurred a thirst in you. Maybe your disappointment in it leads you astray of that band and in search for something more adequate. There’s plenty to choose from – after all, the sun is starting to set on the summer of Deftonescore. Either way, I’d present lowheaven to you, a band we’ve been very impressed with since their literal beginning. It’s not that the two bands are that similar, but there’s enough connecting threads where if someone posited the above situation to me, I’d throw their new album Ritual Decay at them. Respectfully of course, we’re not animals.
Or are we? lowheaven are primal at their core, as many bands are, but it’s in such a way that it’s acutely relatable if weighed down a bit by thematic, cult-like pomp in their messaging. Dredged up from the emotional woes of COVID isolation, the Toronto band have always channeled rawness in their short life. Ritual Decay‘s a big moment, it being their debut full-length LP and therefore a moment that will define their artistry for the foreseeable future.
The thing you have to immediately understand with lowheaven is that they’re not out here putting up intricate riffs and puzzling song structures. Wrong fucking band. But there is immense power and finesse to be found here, and good writing – we’ll get to that. As it’s put in their EPK’s bio, ‘lowheaven isn’t heavy. lowheaven is obliterating.’ The weight is the point and it makes it sound like Ritual Decay was executive produced by a tectonic shift in the earth. Guitar tones rumble your bones, drums are huge, and vocals are exuberantly laid down whether they’re bellowed, screamed, or cleanly sung.
Even when the band appear to holster their aggression like on the first minute of “Mercy Death” and “Fucking Hell”, there’s a crack in the facade where resentment peeks through, then shatters completely when it’s clear things have boiled over. This makes the more dense moments feel good and cathartic, a leveling of yourself down to the foundation to be rebuilt. Each voice you hear in the vocals (provided by two different members) a veritable devil and angel on your shoulder, except both seem to only plot demise in different ways. And if you don’t enjoy the pump fake of calmness, then “Amherst” is your only sanctuary, it being the only song that could be called ‘calm’, though it’s still haunted by something looming and undeniable like a single thick gray cloud with lightning veins in the sky over your head (the video is also sad).
“Cancer Sleep” is here too, the song so nice they released it twice, first being on their EP collapse. I usually have words for bands that do this kind of seemingly pointless re-release thing, but when it’s arguably your best song and still fits the theme and sound of a newer release, I get it. It has a cosmic-level instrumental drop and a mercurial structure about it that makes it a treat with each album loop.
The deep cuts are putting up a fight though, starting with the aptly named “Fighter Valley”. It’s melodic and treads water, meaning there’s this unease the whole time like it could rise and drown you without notice despite effort to keep your head above. “In Grievance” is an awesome opener with some of the most impressive sections of any song here. Ebbing to and from a loathing tone and a healing one, it’s progressive for lowheaven, a strong start that’s followed up with the blackened precision of “Chemical Pattern”. Ritual Decay ends just as well with “Manic Grace”, a pointed exorcism of lowheaven‘s remaining demons and proof that the work never stops.
There’s a reason (besides it being funny) why earlier I linked that video clip of Nine Inch Nails‘ Trent Reznor talking to a crowd at a show and how they’re not about having a good time, but a bad time. While I doubt lowheaven would go as far as to say that, even jokingly, it goes to show the emotional turmoil that the band stir in at all times. Any shred of hope or reprieve is always met with the blunt end of some metastasizing violence – physical, mental, spiritual, etc. Ritual Decay makes good on its name by showing what it looks like for decay to take over and spread. The decay of faith in yourself and others, structural and societal decay that dates back to the anxiety of COVID lockdown days, and the decay of a reason to care about it all.
Ritual Decay is not explicitly hopeless, but it does very little to assuage that feeling aside from it being a record of tribulation, the finishing and release of which being proof that persistence came out the winner for lowheaven, and sometimes that’s enough. For ten tracks, they want you to wallow and mope, contort and drag your hands across your face just as they did while producing them under tense and deprived circumstances. It’s hard to call an album like this fun, but when it sounds this nice and well-constructed, the contradiction is part of the point because if you have to feel bad, you might as well have a great mirror of a soundtrack to accompany it. This LP’s bold and unapologetic with how it feels, scraping together what sense of goodness and decency in presentation it can to remind us that at the end of the day, this is art and it’s meant to reflect what and who we are.
