Asva
What You Don't Know Is Frontier

It is now established: the new frontier of metal, the new course, the true experimentation that will take this genre to a higher level, as it is already doing, is drone, that is, the deconstruction of everything, just as twelve-tone music was for classical music, here everything built and all predefined rules are destroyed to expand the spaces, creating something truly innovative and highly emotional.

Bands like Sunn0)), Boris, Khanate, and a few others, as well as the indispensable and ultimately true masters of the genre, Burning Witch, are rewriting the history of a music, our beloved metal, which was inexorably heading toward decline, through experimentation that goes far beyond our imagination: extremely slow riffs, drawing from doom and sludge, but also from dark and predominantly seventies hard rock, like that of Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus, Pentagram, etc., repeated ad infinitum through stable cycles, which clash with certain ambient, heavy drones and bass and drum loops here and there, various sounds, creating something truly impenetrable, dark, heavy, pounding, apocalyptic—in other words, everything our beloved music should be.

These Asva by Stuart Dahlquist and b.r.a.d. of the aforementioned Burning Witch, always move within the same coordinates, apocalyptic drone-doom highly acidic and malevolent, but they have such mastery in the matter that they take it even further, even higher, injecting it with oppressive sludge doses, organ sounds that seem to come from hyperspace, so psychedelic, indeed seventies psychedelia, esotericism, and almost black metal doses (as in the masterpiece "A Game in Hell, Hard Work in Heaven": it starts placid, floating, with a female voice drawing truly evocative vocalizations, as if they were the new Dead Can Dance, and exotic, to then explode first in a funeral doom mantra and then in a destructive proto-black metal that rises and exalts the spirit, making it soar toward the sky).

Everything is evocative and dark in here, everything is very heavy, but ultimately much more accessible to people not accustomed to the genre than Sunn 0)) or Khanate were, and precisely for this reason more fascinating and open than everything that has been created in this musical strand, as innovative as it is daunting.

Asva has created their masterpiece, but also the absolute masterpiece of a genre that will provide new lifeblood to the history of music. Mastodontic...