S.I.D.'s Choking Doom Explores the Horror of "Mustard Gas" (Early Track Stream)

Slow and excruciating music seems like an appropriate pairing for a slow and excruciating means of death — chemical warfare, in this case, which Italian doomsters S.I.D.‘s new EP City of Chemistry explores in detail. Corrosive tones and an oppressive, foreboding atmosphere serve as the band’s canvas for diving into this particularly uncomfortable method of war in detail. Listen to “Mustard Gas” off of the EP here:

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“Mustard Gas” highlights City of Chemistry‘s slow, ominous doom, but menacing shades of sludge and death metal lurk here as well–nasty faster parts that come charging out of the smoke to gut unaware listeners. The industrial rough edges make this seem like an urban battle, with concrete debris and dust providing a sonic veneer of filth rather than mud and dirt.

The horrors of war are a common topic in heavy metal, but doom metal brings a particularly potent sense of agony beyond sheer brutality. It’s weirdly analogous to chemical warfare, actually, which tends to be a drawn-out way of killing, and this EP taps directly into that. Ponder the uncomfortable parallels while S.I.D.’s massive doom assails your eardrums.

The band comments:

With 6 minutes of dark shades of sludge, doom, death “Mustard Gas” is the opening track of the EP and introduces the concept of the whole work.

In the slower and more extended parts you can see scenarios of death, battlefields, open-air tombs; the hardest and most nervous parts express the lethality of chemical weapons, the suffering it produces, the death that crushes everything with a din.

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City of Chemistry will release in September through Gruesome Records, SFA Records, and V.A.N.G.A. Record.