Earlier this year, Canadian post-metallers Wake released their killer new album Devouring Ruin, and now they've followed it with a 23-minute, three-song EP that was "conceived in COVID isolation," Confluence. Like the full-length, it's a genre-blurring mix of black metal, grindcore, death metal, post-rock, and more, and it's towering, genuinely epic stuff.
The band spoke to Decibel about it:
“We feel like the momentum of Devouring Ruin propelled us forward into this record,” the band shares. “We had so many ideas and movements we wanted to work with when we were writing Devouring, and there was just a whole lot of ground we didn’t get to cover. Confluence is our place to carry on with some of the experiments we had composed and flesh them out into something concise. The recording feels like a whirring between two separate dimensions; some kind of clarity and some kind of shifted space. All of us wanted to try a whole bunch of different things and we did our best to blend them together into something still purely forceful, but that will hopefully bring to bear other questions for listeners.”
“The whole idea of this EP was to go out of our comfort zone and try some different things,” vocalist Kyle Ball expands. “This time around, I avoided writing overly personal lyrics; there’s a bit of it sprinkled throughout the album, but not a lot. The concepts on this album are about exploring the boundaries of reality and altered states of consciousness; hypothetically inhabiting these realities causing them to crash within themselves. Confluence—meaning the merger of two or more things—directly plays into the artwork, as well as the lyrical themes. The album title was inspired by the album art, which depicts two realities inhabiting one space through a window or doorway.”
