Reality-warping Japanese metallers Sigh join forces with Matt Heafy

For those who like to explore metal’s outer limits, Sigh have long been a reliable source of mindbending benchmarks.

The Japanese cult heroes emerged as ostensible black metal eccentrics, but over the course of nine studio albums they have taken a skilled scalpel to the genre’s basic tenets and rearranged them in increasingly mutant forms, incorporating everything from raging thrash and feral psychedelia to kitsch, B-movie exotica along the way.

Judging by the video for Out Of The Grave, the first track to be released from forthcoming 10th album Graveward, and featuring guest vocals from Trivium frontman Matt Heafy no less, Sigh’s collective grasp on reality is as willingly slender as always. With its stuttering, tic-inducing imagery and deep sense of nightmarish menace, this is another swivel-eyed, kaleidoscopic missive from the far out Far East that suggests that Graveward could be the band’s most wildly inventive and extreme album to date. And if that’s the case, the cosmically faint-hearted need not apply.

WARNING: THE VIDEO BELOW CONTAINS STROBOSCOPIC IMAGERY

Take the red pill and discover Sigh’s Facebook page here!

Dom Lawson began his inauspicious career as a music journalist in 1999. He wrote for Kerrang! for seven years, before moving to Metal Hammer and Prog Magazine in 2007. His primary interests are heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee, snooker and despair. He is politically homeless and has an excellent beard.