Lower case title, upper case sound: ERRA aim for the grandiose on album seven, but the shine is more obvious than the soul.
ERRA want to conjure a vision of grandeur on their seventh record. They’ve got abstractly-worded lower case song titles, traded their monochrome visuals for a fuchsia so bright it almost screams, and they’ve even capped it off with three songs that form a trilogy. Emboldened after the success of 2024’s Cure, which brought them tour slots with Bad Omens and Northlane, the Alabama wrecking crew are gunning for something that feels artistic as well as punishing. The ambition is admirable, even for the scratches in its façade.
From the outset, there’s a sense ERRA want to turn the dials up on every aspect of their sound, particularly the contrast between their thudding heaviness and lighter melodies. Opener stelliform handles this adeptly with a burst of agile, distantly funky fretwork that sharply descends into spiky riffing before the two elements duel each other for the song’s duration. Later, gore of being twists acrobatic soloing around soaring melodies but it truly hits its stride when its riffs hit depths as apocalyptic as its lyrics – ‘Submit to the violence of mortality / No cure, no meaning.’ Black cloud, meanwhile, represents their melodic peak, with guitarist and clean vocalist Jesse Cash’s hair-raising near howl of, ‘Where are you now / In the shape of shifting waves of clouds?’
There’s immense skill and musicianship on show here, but sometimes it isn’t the easiest to connect with. A rich emotional undercurrent that takes in the present world’s horrors as well as personal difficulty seems to get a little lost under the barrage of ideas, perhaps not given enough room to break the surface of its shiny production. The cleaner parts aren’t quite as original as they could be and even occasionally sound clinical – see the slightly over-digital chorus of lucid threshold. It’s a dense, technical and slick body of work, of course, but when the riffs roll in, they don’t carry you off with them in the way ERRA might hope.
Verdict: 3/5
For fans of: Periphery, Currents, Northlane
silence outlives the earth is out on March 6 via UNFD.
