Nate Garrett is one of heavy metal’s great dreamers. The albums he’s made over the past decade with his flagship project, Spirit Adrift, would seem quixotic if they weren’t so utterly self-assured. These are works of deep conviction, carved in steel by a true believer in metal’s transcendental power. While most of Garrett’s peers have reluctantly embraced the fragmentation of the genre’s post-commercial era, Spirit Adrift have distinguished themselves by making stridently big-tent music that sounds like it’s battling Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica for chart position in 1991. Arena metal is effectively a meaningless term unless you’re on a short list of legacy bands (Maiden, Priest) and barely-metal novelties (Sleep Token, Ghost), but Garrett’s work on modern classics like 2017’s Curse of Conception and 2019’s Divided by Darkness made that kind of mainstream breakthrough seem theoretically in play. The world of metal will be a less wondrous place without Spirit Adrift, which Garrett is retiring after the release of the band’s sixth album, Infinite Illumination.
Sadly, the band never did reach that wide audience that it always sounded like it was courting. Every Spirit Adrift show I ever saw was in a bar or a small club, and their apparent farewell show was in a support slot. (A move to the deep-pocketed Sony subsidiary Century Media didn’t seem to make a difference, and Infinite Illumination is coming out through the band’s previous label, 20 Buck Spin.) That’s a shame, but Garrett remains indefatigable. He has irons in several new creative fires now, including the Type O Negative homage Neon Nightmare and a planned solo album. To hear Garrett tell it, the final push to end Spirit Adrift came from a kind of superstitious self-preservation. “Whenever I finish writing a Spirit Adrift record, something awful happens,” he told Bandcamp Daily’s J. Bennett in one of the few interviews he’s done for the new album. As Infinite Illumination neared completion, his wife was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and that’s when Garrett knew he was done. The final iteration of Spirit Adrift—Garrett, co-guitarist Jason Dahlke, bassist Sonny DeCarlo, and drummer Mike Arellano—will at least go out on a high note. Infinite Illumination is a triumph of melodic, soul-stirring, profoundly heavy metal.
There have been a handful of stylistic variations on the Spirit Adrift formula over the years, and Infinite Illumination touches on most of them. The slow-burning grandeur of their earliest work comes through on the title track and “You Will Never Hold the Key.” When they started out, Spirit Adrift were considered part of the wave of neo-doom bands that included Pallbearer and Khemmis, and they recapture some of the spacious, stargazing mood of that period here. Midtempo trad-metal rippers “Window Within” and “White Death” nod to the band’s Divided by Darkness peak, while the quick n’ dirty “Born in a Bad Way” revives the Pantera-playing-Southern-rock stomp of their brief Century Media era. As ever, a bunch of Garrett’s syrupy, down-tuned riffs emphasize that grunge, like nearly every other guitar-based genre, has deep roots in Black Sabbath. (Guest guitar solos by Crypt Sermon’s Steve Jansson, Eternal Champion’s Arthur Rizk, and former Death guitarist James Murphy are fist-bumps of mutual admiration that make Infinite Illumination feel like a going-away party.) The cumulative effect of this album is one of culmination, a sense that Garrett has mastered this range of heavy sounds and can now combine them at will.
As impressive as Garrett’s compositional mastery is, Spirit Adrift is still primarily about feel. This is explicitly inspirational music; the first person that it inspired was Garrett himself, who started writing for the project after getting out of alcohol detox in 2015. (In that same Bandcamp interview, Garrett revealed that he broke a nine-year sobriety streak in the run-up to making Infinite Illumination.) The ideal Nate Garrett tune sounds like someone at the bottom of a dark pit, reaching out for a distant light. Infinite Illumination sustains that feeling for 46 minutes. Garrett’s workmanlike, achingly human vocals are perfectly suited to that mode. He’s closer to James Hetfield than Rob Halford, his voice full of strangled passion, not piercing virtuosity.
Still, the vocal performance on Infinite Illumination is the best one Garrett’s given, and that’s because Spirit Adrift’s music is also about relentless self-improvement. I interviewed Garrett prior to Divided by Darkness, and he told me he had written guitar parts for the album that he couldn’t yet physically play, with the idea that he’d be forced to get better. For Garrett, the key is always inside oneself, trapped in frail and fallible flesh, but attainable through determination and sustained effort. As he sings at one of Infinite Illumination’s emotional peaks, “Heaven’s still out of reach/Open up a window within.” That’s been his approach across the past decade. Infinite Illumination is a closing door, sure. But Garrett’s always been more interested in the opening window.
