Back from the black once again, Sheffield’s
Ba’al have returned with a new EP of overwhelming emotional power. Darker, more harrowing and yet ultimately more uplifting than anything the band have released before,
Soft Eyes is comprised of a trilogy of vast tracks that will fall with you into the depths of despair, walk you through the cold fires of loss and pull you through the claustrophobic catacombs of grief, towards the first faint rays of hope. Raging and tumultuous, seething and insidious, scouring and cleansing – Soft Eyes will consume your senses and leave you spent.
Ba’al’s 2020 debut album, Ellipsism shocked the music press with its bleak intensity, leaving critics wondering what darkness could follow in its wake – and now Soft Eyes is here to finally provide the answers. Opening with the stunning, unfolding story of ‘Ornamental Doll’ the EP proceeds to unravel the listener, to dismantle them and lay bare their old scars and open wounds. Operating in the shadowed chasms that lie between the stark walls of genre, where monsters walk amongst the lost and unchained, Soft Eyes draws blood from doom, black, post and sludge metal, siphons off the essence of ambient and noise, reaches down into the emotive atmosphere of gothic mourning and sculpts the resulting clay into tortured graven images and monoliths of melancholy. The music moves from the cataclysmically heavy to the darkly brooding, shifts from deft, simmering rhythms to shattering explosions of thunder, slips quietly between hidden places and then roars into the light, tearing down defences in outpourings of agony and rage.
The sweeping sonic contours and dramatic dynamics of Soft Eyes were shaped by the engineering and mixing skills of Joe Clayton (Conjurer, Dawn Walker, Mountain Caller, Ithaca etc) at No Studio in Manchester and the mastering magic of Brad Boatright (Kylesa, Vastum, Obituary, Night Demon etc) at Audiosiege – and the results are simply magnificent; the three songs that form this record have become living, breathing, screaming entities. Ba’al have never sounded so potent, reaching new levels of soul-tearing, heart-rending splendour. Prepare to embrace the darkness within when Ripcord Records unleash this EP on May 3rd and Ba’al’s Soft Eyes turn to stare into you.
Find out more about Ba’al here
Visit Ba’al on Facebook
Enter the shadowed halls of Ba’al’s online temple here
Visit Ripcord Records on Bandcamp here
