Chicago metal (and more) band Huntsmen are following 2020’s great Mandala of Fear (and 2022’s brief The Dying Pines EP) with their third full-length album, The Dry Land, on June 7 via Prosthetic (pre-order). The band says this is their first album to feature “the first full collaborative inclusion” of vocalist Aimee Bueno-Knipe (who joined in 2019), and it was recorded and mixed by Pete Grossmann.
The first taste is the seven-and-a-half minute “In Time, All Things,” which is a pretty remarkable blend of prog, folk, and doom/sludge that sounds like the middle ground between Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, and Neurosis, with a coda that gets a little more black-metally than Huntsmen usually do. It comes with a cinematic music video directed by Ryan Luciani (GoodFriend Video), and you can check that out below.
“We chose ‘In Time, All Things’ as our first single because it is a sanctuary directly at the border between life and death, which is the subject matter of The Dry Land,” says guitarist/vocalist Chris Kang. “It’s a place where an exhausted traveler can find respite while looking upon the mirrored realms, reflect upon their beauty, indifference, and desolation, and decide next steps.”
“For those who have seen death, the warm light of the living day must share space in the heart with the frigid night of the eternal process,” Chris continues. “Where once the only direction was forward, now there is also back, where the dead remain, frozen in time. The survivor is pulled between both, their soul the prize in a war as old as existence. We hope to capture the possibility that both the night and day can coexist, balanced, within the still-beating heart.”
Huntsmen have one upcoming show announced at the moment: a hometown Chicago release show on June 7 at Sleeping Village with Without Waves and Anatomy of Habit.
Tracklist
1. This, Our Gospel
2. Cruelly Dawns
3. Lean Times
4. In Time, All Things
5. Rain
6. Herbsight