An industrial-heavy but bewitchingly melodic return sees chameleonic California alt.metallers In This Moment turning another page…
When Maria Brink sings ‘You got me feeling like God, yeah…’, it’s like a serial killer just slipped out of your wardrobe at 3am – it’s smooth, scary and utterly unexpected. This is Godmode, the title-track and opener from In This Moment’s eighth album, a release that yet again sees the band’s creative core – Maria and guitarist Chris Howorth – going to new places while retaining the musical DNA that attracted us in the first place.
Maria ‘sees’ music; she doesn’t just listen to it. Everything comes with a bigger picture. The eye-popping video for single The Purge has over 2.2 million views already, and that’s not due to luck. Chris, meanwhile, spent much of lockdown getting to grips with programming and electronic music. Nobody that has followed the band’s evolving career will be surprised to learn that Godmode is exciting, diverting and very much a product of this hour.
Sacrifice and Skyburner feed from a threatening industrial pulse, delivering cathartic hooks. Sanctify Me, even better, sees urgent synths battle a deep-diving Howorth riff. Maria’s vocal is a vicious, throat-clawing thing that then swoops in entirely different but no less aerobatic direction. This, the title-track and many others here can stand proudly beside the similarly shape-shifting thrill of everyone from Bring Me The Horizon to Lake Malice.
From electronic throb and dark pop menace, Godmode persistently creates new textures that nevertheless resolve in ways that will get heads nodding and hands raised at the band’s uniquely theatrical live shows. Fate Bringer’s killer hook seems to have come from the darker reaches of space, but it’s just another strange delicacy from the apparently bottomless pit of inspiration that makes In The Moment’s music so perennially thrilling. It also confirms, yet again, that the band’s reclusive, bohemian leader is both creative whirlwind and one of rock’s most powerful women.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Nine Inch Nails, Poppy, Within Temptation
Godmode is out October 27 via BMG
