What kind of music best suits an era of sociopolitical upheaval? While Obsidian Wreath is playing, blackened screamo seems like the only acceptable answer. Infant Island’s third album is yet another broad-gesturing statement about these times in an era overflowing with like-minded music, but Obsidian Wreath embodies the chaos more than it chastises about it. The sense of drama is sky-high, from the desperate-sounding clean strums and roll of rim clicks that open “Another Cycle” to the self-immolating coda that ignites just when closer “Vestygian” seems like it’s dying out. This isn’t the angriest skramz album, nor is it the prettiest, but there’s a good chance that it’s the most tempestuous.
Infant Island already married black metal’s massive scale with screamo’s purple hues on 2020’s Beneath and Sepulcher EP, but both feel icy and brittle in comparison to Obsidian Wreath’s warm, heaving textures. Alongside the baked-in Virginia skramz ancestry, the band singles out Panopticon and Deafheaven as chief influences: The former’s penchant for folk and bowed instruments and the latter’s lush guitar tones provide a roadmap for evolution. Even if you reduced Obsidian Wreath to a standard guitar-bass-drums setup, it would feel baroque and grandiose. Alexander Rudenshiold and Winston Givler’s guitars sound beyond multi-tracked; it’s as if there’s a few rows of players all shredding to sheet music. The tremolo-heavy style of picking in many songs almost replicates the buzz of a string section. Drummer Austin O’Rourke conducts the maelstrom both literally—he is additionally credited with piano, cello, accordion, mandolin, and orchestral arrangement—and figuratively, as his stickwork guides the music between unexpected movements that nevertheless hit all of the marks.
The album opens with the furiously paced “Another Cycle” and “Fulfilled,” which both eventually deliver varied takes on the never-tired “bring back the nasty riff but slower” trope. From there, Infant Island begin to flex their extracurricular talents. “Found Hand” is an eerie noise piece akin to those on Beneath and Sepulcher. The mid-album suite of “Veil” and “Amaranthine” moves between uplifting, anthemic gang vocals, a delicate acoustic passage, and bookending peaks. “Kindling,” featuring Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval of the doomgaze band Greet Death, spends its first half as a slowcore song. It’s not as if Infant Island need these deviations to freshen up their sound—their screamo base is already tempered by black metal, which is in turn undercut by a grindcore-esque rhythmic creativity that avoids the fatigue of constant blastbeats. But Obsidian Wreath’s softest moments add to its overall heft, the rising and falling actions lending more weight than an end-to-end sonic assault would.
Written in 2020, Obsidian Wreath is, according to the press release, yet another “pandemic record.” The band cites the United States’ “apathy towards social health,” along with the ongoing crises of climate and capitalism, as the primary targets of Rudenshiold and lead vocalist Daniel Kost’s lyrics. Cut-and-dry sentiments like “How could you spare to inconvenience your comfort?” share space with characteristic screamo abstractions like “Eternity weaved over your lavender grave.” Of course, you’d need a lyric sheet to grasp Infant Island’s politics, but Obsidian Wreath’s visceral churn is a natural fit for the looming specters determining the fate of the planet. While their music has never seemed more suited for apocalypse, the future of Infant Island feels newly limitless.
