hope drone void lustre

Ashen Metal: Hope Drone's "This Body Will Be Ash" is Bleak and Unforgiving

hope drone void lustre

I’ve been pretty lucky, having lived in apartments for the last decade but only receiving a handful of noise complaints over the years. One of those complaints, though, was entirely fair and deserved: I had just received my vinyl copy of Hope Drone‘s debut full-length Cloak of Ash which released in 2015, and I just had to crank the shit out of it. I loved the band’s penchant for postmodern black metal with dense atmospherics and long-format undulations in intensity across behemoth songs — I also loved the way this album sounded (production and all), so the only reasonable thing to do was to enjoy it at unreasonable volume. I apologized to my neighbor, who was totally fine, perhaps because she too understood the power this band can so effortlessly wield.

Well, now it’s time to step back into noise complaint territory, because Hope Drone are returning at the end of this month with the follow-up titled Void Lustre. While ten minutes shorter than the debut, this album still contains over an hour’s worth of ascents toward the stars and descents toward the pit of your stomach. Get a taste now with an exclusive stream of Void Lustre‘s penultimate track “This Body Will Be Ash.”

In typical Hope Drone fashion, the band spreads dozens of ideas out across single tracks, but manages to tie them all together for a seamless experience (they also manage to tie tracks together too, giving Void Lustre as a whole that same seamlessness). With “This Body Will Be Ash,” the fires burn bright to start but gradually dwindle away, revealing a profound and anxious darkness by the song’s ten-minute mark which then explodes into its staggered, anxiety-inducing closing remarks. The whole experience is very all-encompassing, with Hope Drone utilizing elements of modern black metal, post-metal, and even blackgaze to weave their grand and bleak sermons. There are blast beats aplenty, for sure, but the band really comes into focus during those tense midpoints between climaxes which, as usual, leave you wanting more and more.

Void Lustre releases August 30th via Moment of Collapse Records.

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