Lord-Mantis-NTW

Lord Mantis prepping 'NTW' EP, share new song "Sig Safer"

There’s been a lot of shake-up in the Chicago extreme metal scene lately. A hot-spot for often great, always brutal, sometimes controversial extreme music, a bunch of central bands have undergone a lot of turmoil and membership turnover. One such band, the blackened doom-metal crew Lord Mantis, have emerged in a drastically different incarnation then we last found them. Former vocalist Charlie Fell has departed to front the great Cobalt, and the band now features vocalist Dylan O’Toole and bassist Will Lindsay of the seminal, dissolved Chicago doom metal band Indian, along with original members Andrew Markuszewski and Bill Bumgardner.

Lord Mantis are prepping a new EP called NTW, and they’ve shared a new song called “Sig Safer.” It’s a furious, blasted-out, driving piece of extreme metal that sounds like the exact kind of scorched-earth bleakness you would expect from this crew. There are prominent elements of both old Lord Mantis and Indian, Bumgardner’s roiling drumming and O’Toole’s signature high-pitched scream among them. The infusion of new talent also seems to have brought, most prominently, a new sense of atmosphere that hews closer to Indian’s slightly arty sense of hate then Lord Mantis’s just filthy, basement-dwelling, more riff-heavy aesthetic. This is all to say: if you were a fan of either of those bands, then you probably like basking in the darkest recesses of where heavy music can take you, and you will find a lot to like here.

NTW hits on April 29 via New Density. Stream “Sig Safer” (via CVLT Nation) below.