Empress AD

If you are a regular on the live circuit, there is a good chance you have caught Empress AD.  Recent years has seen them support everyone from Cancer Bats to Kvelertak to Bring Me the Horizon, while also changing their name from just Empress and being signed to Roadrunner.  It’s gained them a reputation as a promising band, their heavy progressive sound insuring that they weren’t easy to forget, but it can be hard to truly love a band until you own their album, which is no longer a problem with the release of their debut Still Life Moving Fast.

It’s a debut album that continues to prove this band have all the potential to be great.  If you are looking for an obvious comparison, it has to come in the form of Mastodon, particularly on tracks like opener “Invisible Conductor”, (it’s the opener if you discount the short musical title track that sees us in).  With it’s sludgy riffs and progressive edge, combined with lead singer Ollie Loring’s bellowed vocals, it’s a fantastic starting point and in many ways set out exactly what you can expect from this band.

This album is full of great musical moments, such as the slow dirge that introduces “Delve into the Retrospect”.  This is a band who can play and having honed their skills on the road have obviously got it together in a major way.  In that same song you can spot elements from greats like Pink Floyd, entwining with that sludge metal sound and it brings another dimension to a band that already have a few up their sleeve.  There is no fear here of slipping away from the heavy and into the melodic and in many ways it’s a move that they often revel in on tracks like “On My Return.”  If there is to be one criticism, there is a lack of a stand out track.  As a single being this album is great, but if you take the songs individually you would struggle to pick a single, to pick the one that is going to get an audiences attention and have them tune in.  However, with the skill that is obviously on display, it feels like a problem that in the future will be very curable.

Having come up the right way and with a good album under the belt, Empress AD can be very much added into the ever growing legion of great British metal bands.  What may make them even more likely to succeed is that in among those bands they are very much unique.  This isn’t trade by numbers metalcore or even the synth heavy style that Bring Me the Horizon have brought to the forefront of the ‘scene’.  Instead this is progressive and exciting music that stands pretty much by itself in terms of young British bands at this time.  If they can perfect this sound and create the kind of tracks that bands like Mastodon have managed to add to their repertoire, Empress AD could very well go far.  In the here and now this is an album that is worth your time and if you are at all into music with a brain, then Empress AD should be high up your list of bands to check out.