California metalcore mob Silent Planet mix djent, electro and shoegaze to intoxicating effect on fascinating fifth album SUPERBLOOM.
It’s funny how projects change shape, sometimes. The two-year writing and recording process for Silent Planet’s ambitious fifth album was split in half by a van crash during a Wyoming snowstorm while on tour in November 2022, and the resultant 12-song sprawl seems to have been fractured by the experience. Thrillingly so. On one side, you have the weighty electro-infused djent they’d been building for the previous 13 years, while on the other bleeds in a sense of almost supernatural, shoegazey wonder following their brief brush with death.
That title, SUPERBLOOM, encapsulates the resultant soundscape well. A reference to the verdant wildflower displays that sporadically carpet the arid, inhospitable California desert, it translates to a foundation of vicious alt.metal wreathed in cosmic synths and fluttering vocal layers of melancholy and wonder. Offworlder and Dreamwalker, for instance, feel like they could be vicious bonus-level offcuts from Mick Gordon’s DOOM soundtrack. But songs like Antimatter trade such violent immediacy for pulsating grooves and dense sci-fi atmospherics obsessed with the endlessness of outer-space.
A heavy handedness upsets the balance, occasionally. Overproduction robs excellent vocal performances of their humanity to jarring effect here and there, and a few moments of sheer Meshuggah-styled heaviness pale in comparison to the complexity elsewhere. But the ability to make sounds that are ubiquitously on-trend these days feel fresh and truly cutting-edge must be applauded. And by the time the title-track concludes SUPERBLOOM’s loose alien narrative in a crescendo of breathy high drama, you’ll be ready to follow Silent Planet to infinity and beyond. Give these lads their flowers.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Bring Me The Horizon, Periphery, Sleep Token
SUPERBLOOM is out November 3 via Solid State
