Courtesy Mike Elliot
Audio By Carbonatix
Lorna Shore did it again.
After dropping the brutally symphonic Pain Remains in 2022, the first album featuring newly christened vocalist Will Ramos, the New Jersey extreme-metal titans somehow topped that effort with follow-up I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me, released September 12 via Century Media.
The new record takes what the five-piece laid out on Pain Remains — epic instrumentals over deathcore beats and a surprising penchant for storytelling — and doubled-down by somehow synthesizing even more unlikely elements into a subgenre that’s recently been saturated with trendy slam riffs and breakdowns.
“For me, my approach was how do we do what we do as a band, create the sound that we love and people know us for, but bring it forward?” guitarist Adam De Micco says. “That was something that was a challenge.
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“And coming off an album like Pain Remains, which everyone in the band loves, it’s hard to top that,” he continues. “The approach this time around was trying to create songs that felt individual to each other, and they each have their own strengths that the other songs don’t have.”
I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me wastes no time in throwing listeners into the frenetic frenzy with opener “Prison of Flesh,” followed by “Oblivion” — both clocking in at over seven-minutes in length.
“We try to do every record like that,” says De Micco, whose riffs have been featured on all five Lorna Shore LPs since 2010. “I just picture what it was like when I was a kid and I got a CD and you put it on for the first time and start with the first track: What would I want that first feeling to be like? Almost every record we start out the gate swinging for that reason.”
Courtesy Lorna Shore
Other than the complexity of musicianship — drummer Austin Archey shows of some Olympic-level chops across the ten tracks — Lorna Shore’s divergency is what makes this album hit so hard. On “Unbreakable,” the shortest song at just under five minutes, there are hints of power metal, while the saga of closer “Forevermore” unfolds beautifully — a word not typically used to describe music this inherently heavy — for nearly ten minutes, from operatic backing chorals and classical piano compositions to full-blown metal madness and Ramos’s insane vocal range.
“We were trying to write a more diverse Lorna Shore record, as opposed to what we did on Pain Remains, which there was maybe a few different styles,” De Micco explains, adding that he pulled in death metal and classic rock when working on his guitar parts. “Each song feels like it has its own characteristic purpose.
“If you look at a song like ‘Prison of Flesh’ and then a song like ‘Unbreakable,’ which are two completely different songs, but they’re on the same record, that to me is what we were all going for is being able to do our sound in two completely different ways and do that across ten songs on a record,” he continues.
Lorna Shore, which also includes guitarist Andrew O’Connor and bassist Michael Yager, rolls into Denver on Tuesday, October 21, for a date at the Fillmore Auditorium. The Black Dahlia Murder, Shadow of Intent and PeelingFlesh are also on the brutal bill.
With the current tour winding down, De Micco admits that he’s feeling pretty good about whatever comes next, whether that’s writing a new record sooner than later or letting I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me, which the band initially promoted via an ominous roadside billboard along the New Jersey Turnpike back in May, have its deserved time in the spotlight. Either way, Lorna Shore’s stake as one of the most exciting acts in modern extreme metal has been securely claimed. But that doesn’t mean the five are totally content.
“We’re trying to push it and see how far we can possibly take it. It’s more fun to try to see how far you can push something as opposed to settling,” De Micco concludes. “And we’re curious to see how we can accomplish that through the lens of or under the umbrella of Lorna Shore.”
Lorna Shore, with the Black Dahlia Murder, Shadow of Intent and PeelingFlesh, 5 p.m. Tuesday, October 21, Fillmore Auditorium, 1510 Clarkson Street. Tickets are $88.
