New Releases: Blacken the Skies | Terminal

Twelve harrowing tracks that hold an unflinching mirror up to a world falling out of balance.

We're headed breakneck towards a train wreck

Forsaking honour for a vast charade

Ever descending towards the ending

We filled a prison for the bastard god

'Terror Ride'

In a running-out-of-time unbalanced world, Terminal forges a volatile alloy of industrial music, glam rock, dark techno, synthpop and raw machine recordings, shaping a perfect soundtrack to our out-of-control society. Each Terminal song is built as an anthem against the atrocities of our lost humanity. The hard-hitting lyrics address urgent themes from the immorality of authoritarian regimes to the devastation of our planet.

The group’s debut album, Blacken The Skies, feels like a manifesto. For Thomas Mark Anthony, singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist and solo studio member, the band's commentary on the world’s ills finds no shortage of new inspiration. Themes like authoritarian regimes brutally silencing journalists, extrajudicial violence, racial injustice, pandemics and climate collapse are - tragically - timeless. "Every track has to be a strong song first and foremost," he states. "From there, I start shaping the sounds I need to paint the picture." A darkly beautiful sonic painting it is, too, placing Anthony's gritty vocals and rough-hewn guitar in echoing, ruined industrial spaces where relentless beats stir a miasma of broken circuitry and vast machines. Each track is intentionally terse. "I don't think I need to belabor the point", he adds. "If you can't say it in 4 minutes, it's probably not worth saying".

Born in Pretoria, South Africa and raised in Canada, Anthony is a lifelong anti-apartheid and civil rights activist. When asked to name his musical influences, his first answers are T.Rex and Cabaret Voltaire. The lovechild of those disparate genres will delight fans of 1980's EBM and 1990's industrial. Blacken The Skies is an experimental surgery of sinister vocals, circuit-bent machinery and ragged guitars, resulting in an EBM/industrial/glam rock fusion with barbed wire electronics and anthemic choruses. The album explores and highlights Anthony's seemingly contradictory influences, from the near-techno pulse of 'Riot Shields' to the borderline nu-metal 'Godfire' passing through a Front 242 style 'Fault Line'.

Blacken the Skies will be released on February the 5th, pre-orders are available both on Metropolis Records and the Terminal Bandcamp.

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