Anareta Fuses Blackened, Doomed Metal With Chamber Music On New Single (Early Song Debut)
New Orleans’ Anareta fulfills a very specific desire I have–emotive metal with an actual, analog, arco string section is a rarity to the point of novelty. Sure, violin makes an appearance in a lot of symphonic and gothic music, and yet venturing into the world of actual orchestration and the use of more than one bowed string instrument in conjunction with your standard metal band configuration is so unbelievably rare that I can think of just a couple examples (which don’t exploit Christmas music for a huge paycheck). On their debut album Fear Not, Anareta fuses a variety of backgrounds from metal to punk, folk, and traditional Art music (some call this “Classical,” but don’t do that) to present a doomed, blackened take on highly emotive and deeply composed music that straddles a wide genre berth.
Fear Not‘s second single “Unforgiving Sun” is a prime example of the band’s highly metallic but still thoughtful compositions, never letting either half of the band (metal and chamber music) fully take over the sound, resulting in something more meshed than simply throwing a violin over black metal or adding harsh vocals to orchestral music. Anareta obviously took their time putting this album together, trading melodies between instruments with ease and crafting intriguingly structured songs to pair two generally unrelated ensembles together as a cohesive unit. Listen to “Unforgiving Sun” ahead of Fear Not‘s April 8th release below.
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From the band:
“Unforgiving Sun” is inspired by the interminable summers of New Orleans; the air thickens, tourism slows to a trickle, storefronts shutter. The sun-soaked blacktop radiates heat long past dusk’s false promise of respite. As this song opens we lean into this sense of swimming through thick humidity and airless nights, every movement burdened by weather; but underneath this seasonal malaise there is tension building. The song swells to reveal a system under pressure, one that inevitably finds a release. Strangling vines, termite and mosquito swarms, tropical storms, crime rates; all these things escalate and explode outward with abandon in the face of this unrelenting force.
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Fear Not releases independently on April 8th.
