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Music

Cloak's Southern Gothic Debut Is Full of Heavy Metal Magic

The Atlanta quartet alchemize black metal, traditional metal, and melodeath on their stunning Season of Mist debut, which we're streaming in full here.
Photo by David Parham

First things first: yes, at one point, there were two metal-centric bands call Cloak floating around the American underground. One of them—based in San Francisco—changed their name to Succumb and released a brilliant death metal record earlier this year; the one we're discussing today is much more traditional, hails from Atlanta, and has held fast to their original moniker. Both Cloaks still retain entries in the Encyclopedia Metallum, though, so in case this post piques your interest and you want to dig deeper into their catalogue, I thought it worthwhile to stick a little warning note in here.

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Anyway, so, Cloak! This rising quartet traffics in timeless heavy metal thunder tinged with an underlying current of shamelessly melodic black/death metal (think Dissection's polished, melodeath-tinged Reinkaos) that sashays into Satyricon-esque black 'n' roll when the mood strikes. The band have cultivated a certain grand, Southern Gothic air, as well, channeling melancholia and magnolias instead of the swampy, down-tuned menace we've been conditioned to expect from metal made south of the Mason-Dixon. There's something awfully special about these guys, and I hope this release catches fire the way it deserves to—there's a spark of genuine, exciting creativity here that's well worth nurturing.

"To Cloak, music is art and art is magic," the band said in a statement to Noise. "It is transformative and primal in ways that cannot be simply explained. When we began writing To Venomous Depths, we knew we were on to something special; something powerful and fervent. The further we dove into the creative process, the further we ventured into the lowest parts of our consciousness and the highest points of our souls so that every last bit of ourselves bled out into our music. Where we ended up is something that cannot be summarized, it can only be felt. We welcome the listener to join us in that feeling in the hopes that it destroys and revives you just as it has done to us."

You can do just that below thanks to our exclusive album stream. It's out November 10 via Season of Mist (who are running preorders here). Listen below while sipping on some sweet tea spiked with arsenic.

Kim Kelly is staying hungry on Twitter.