Full EP Premiere: WAKE – ‘Confluence’

WAKE band photo

Canadian revelations WAKE have already done their part to distract us from the plague. Back in March they released their monstrous Devouring Ruin LP. Less than seventh months later, WAKE stir from their brief slumber with a new EP. Brimming with creativity and carnage, you can stream Confluence below before it’s released from Translation Loss Records.

“Disparity and Chaos” opens Confluence with an 11+ minute composition bridging widescreen black metal and post-metal. Skyflung lead guitars stab the storm clouds as Kyle Ball snarls through gnashing teeth. After the contemplative opener, “Beyond Empyrean” commences with a pace-changing charge. Josh Bueckert’s limber rhythms add an elusive mystique before the track’s final blasts. The opening death stomps of “Entropic Cascade Failure” return WAKE to the primal pursuits of Misery Rites before the song’s unsettling denouement. The EP is both sprawling and contained; feral and restrained. Confluence feels like WAKE let their curiosity run amok, and that’s by design.

“We feel like the momentum of Devouring Ruin propelled us forward into this record,” the band shares. “We had so many ideas and movements we wanted to work with when we were writing Devouring, and there was just a whole lot of ground we didn’t get to cover. Confluence is our place to carry on with some of the experiments we had composed and flesh them out into something concise. The recording feels like a whirring between two separate dimensions; some kind of clarity and some kind of shifted space. All of us wanted to try a whole bunch of different things and we did our best to blend them together into something still purely forceful, but that will hopefully bring to bear other questions for listeners.”

“The whole idea of this EP was to go out of our comfort zone and try some different things,” vocalist Kyle Ball expands. “This time around, I avoided writing overly personal lyrics; there’s a bit of it sprinkled throughout the album, but not a lot. The concepts on this album are about exploring the boundaries of reality and altered states of consciousness; hypothetically inhabiting these realities causing them to crash within themselves. Confluencemeaning the merger of two or more thingsdirectly plays into the artwork, as well as the lyrical themes. The album title was inspired by the album art, which depicts two realities inhabiting one space through a window or doorway.”

Embrace disparity and chaos by streaming WAKE’s Confluence below.

Pre-order WAKE’s Confluence from Translation Loss Records HERE

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