Cave Moth Make Black Metal To Remember on "In Memory Eternal" (Early EP Stream)

March 27, 2024

Fun fact: I listened to Cave Moth’s new EP, In Memory Eternal, so many times that the promo eventually booted me from listening anymore.

It’s barely 10 minutes long, so it’s not a marathon by any means, but each listen massaged the EP’s patterns into my brain until the disparate tracks that migrate between black metal, screamo, and noise became seamless. While Cave Moth have dabbled with various types of extreme subgenres, this is their first foray into black metal, though it’s not typical by any means.

Opening tracks “In Memory Eternal” and “In Memoria Aeterna” marry tremolo picking with scratchy tones and heart-on-the-sleeve vocals, blurring the line between black metal and screamo. In isolation, both genres are quite different, but Cave Moth find their overlapping features. In Memory Eternal’s lynchpin is Sweet Creem, a Knoxville-based singer whose cleans are true to screamo's (and punk music as a whole) ethos, as defined by Kurt Cobain: “As sloppy as you want. As long as it’s good and it has passion.”

She also supplied Cave Moth with the samples and field recordings that slice between tracks and vocalize In Memory Eternal’s thought process, which, in guitarist/vocalist Daniel Quinn’s words, is the “existentialist imagery about the personal connections we had to those we loved and lost.” Listen to the EP in full before Cave Moth self-releases it this Friday.

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