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Music

NYC Black Metal Force Anicon's New Video for “The World As Will” Tames The Blurry Wilderness

The track comes off 'Exegeses,' the NYC black metallers' new album for Gilead Media.

Photo by Frank Huang

What New York City black metallers Anicon do best is channel the strong emotions at the core of vague memories. The band’s full-length debut, Exegeses, is a tornado of yearning guitars and frantic percussion, more melodic and emotionally unburdened than efforts by peers like Mutilation Rites or Krallice (the latter of which also features Anicon drummer Lev Weinstein).

As such, Anicon doesn’t get bogged down in the hard lines of any incarnation of black metal. Guitarists Nolan Voss and Owen Rundquist craft riffs that are infectious and arch while still raw and vibrant, never veering too hard towards the menacing or the experimental. There’s no blood chalice being raised to Lucifer here, but rather a pointed sense of melancholy and outrage surrounded by a barrage of fleeting ideas of how things once were.

The band’s new video for “The World As Will” captures this well. The track’s opening riff and consistent momentum draw the listener in immediately, so that the video becomes accompaniment to a killer song instead of an attempted mini-movie. There’s a storyline of sorts here, maybe—a hesher walks into the wilderness, discovers a white circle on the ground, taps into the natural magics that surround us all—but it’s given to us in a flash of evocative imagery. The result is a video more about sense memories, the tall grass tickling your shins and the sand grinding between your fingers, the mineral smell of cold water.

Watch “The World As Will” below. Anicon’s latest, Exegeses, is out now on Gilead Media.

Chris Krovatin is seeing stars on Twitter.