Lucius Fox Ignites a Progressive Metal Storm on "Pyrocumulonimbus" (Early Track Stream)
Change is at the heart of Lucius Fox‘s new album Solastalgia. Conceptually, the Michigan heavy progressive band has dedicated their latest album to their home state’s surroundings and how its natural beauty changes throughout the seasons — but the threat of climate change and other man-made disasters seep into the work as well. In fact, that’s what the title references: Solastalgia “refers directly to anxiety wrought from changes to one’s surroundings as a result of climate change,” notes guitarist Jeremy Cronk in a statement accompanying the album’s initial announcement today. On the debut single “Pyrocumulonimbus,” which we’ve got for you below, the two-piece flexes their instrumental might in a dazzling display of aggressive progressive metal–throw sludge, grind, and mathcore together and the unstable output is just a fraction of what Lucius Fox offers here.
Note: A pyrocumulonimbus, as the band describes it, is “[a] wildfire producing enough smoke, particulate matter and water vapor that it creates its own cumulonimbus clouds capable of lightning strikes that will sustain the fire until fuel is expended.”
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While “Pyrocumulonimbus” combines the band’s instrumental metal chops with some gnarly synthesizers to tremendous effect, even more multidisciplinary treats await within the whole of Solastalgia–the band wields bluegrass, pop, and more as they craft a tale of fragile balances and the forces that could destroy them. These tangents represent some of the most interesting parts of the album, where the earthquake-in-fast-forward heaviness steps back to let musing synthesizers and rock beats take its place. These fantastical deviations add even more headroom to the band’s heavier side.
Solastalgia captures a particularly tragic dissonance in its own dynamic construction: the love of what we have and the fear of what’s to come. For Lucius Fox, when it comes to their home state, neither emotion can fully defeat the other, and so they’ve rendered both in blazing, intricate music.
The band comments:
Solastalgia is a term created by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. It lends a name to the feeling of being homesick while still at home and refers directly to anxiety wrought from changes to one’s surroundings as a result of climate change. I came across this term while reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate and it immediately resonated with me. The bookending songs of the album we had been writing were meant to evoke the competing feelings of the love I have for the Lake Michigan shoreline and the fears that I have for its future in the face of climate change. The term solastalgia described my feelings to a tee and ultimately became the title of those songs, as well as the album itself.
The full statement can be found here.
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Solastalgia will release August 19th independently via Bandcamp.
