Enter the unsettling world of blackened doomsayers Bereft

Doom and black metal may seem like like strange bedfellows, but the vast, barren plains that have been doom’s traditional stamping grounds have found a parallel in the wave of eco-lamenting post-BM that’s formed in Wolves In The Throne Room’s wake.

Wisconsin’s Bereft are the one band that have found the common ground between these two, somewhat differently paced subgenres, and fuelled by equally ruinous nature of their native political landscape, their second album, Lands, due to erupt from the Prosthetic Records stable on March 31 is a towering indictment of, well… everything, really.

“With Lands”, say the band themselves, “we wanted to convey, through a loose concept, the disgust we have for the greed and manipulation people suffer through on a constant basis. It’s a reaction to the world around us.”

Colossally weighty, spiritually wracked and fevered in its blackened surges like a blazing angel falling through the stratosphere, Lands will leave no soul unscorched, and we have an exclusive stream of the album in its full, heavens-dismantling glory. So stand at the precipice, look upon the charred and smouldering wreckage below and bellow ‘What have we done?’ to Lands below!

Check out Bereft’s Facebook page here

And pre-order Lands here!

Having freelanced regularly for the Melody Maker and Kerrang!, and edited the extreme metal monthly, Terrorizer, for seven years, Jonathan is now the overseer of all the album and live reviews in Metal Hammer. Bemoans his obsolete superpower of being invisible to Routemaster bus conductors, finds men without sideburns slightly circumspect, and thinks songs that aren’t about Satan, swords or witches are a bit silly.