If you want to talk about album titles that go hard, Locusts and Honey‘s Teach me to live that I dread the grave as little as my bed should be part of the conversation. Just a quick glance at it can already lead to multiple interpretations forming in my mind, but the one that stands out is wanting to live life to the absolute fullest, so that we welcome the big sleep with open arms as much as we do any other night in which we’re exhausted and look forward to collapsing in bed. Ask yourself on a daily basis if you’re living the life that you want to be living. If not, this persistent self-reminder can help drive you to make the subtle corrections and redirections necessary over time so that you can finally answer that question with a resounding ‘YES’. Whatever this ‘YES’ may entail will be different for everybody, but what matters is that it is true for you and you alone.
I am not whipping this random album title out of thin air just because I can, but rather because Everything Is Noise is providing an exclusive premiere of the second single, “Leathern Cord”, from Locusts and Honey‘s new album in anticipation of its release. Formed in 2023, London’s Locusts and Honey is set to release their debut record through Hypaethral Records on May 24. Much like the concept of death (considering how many people choose to ignore it out of crippling fear), the music here isn’t for the faint of heart with Locusts and Honey‘s hauntingly bleak concoction of 90’s doom-esque compositional style, the filthy raw aesthetic of black metal, and otherworldly soundscapes brought on by drone/ambient. While the music is crafted in such a way that it is intentionally bleak as can be, it is meant to inspire from deep within if you let it.
If you weren’t already initiated in the occult prior to listening to “Leathern Cord”, you can most certainly say that you are now! Boasting dense pummeling chords and piercing leads, deeply reverberating bass tones, and horrendously atrocious (in the best of ways as it suits the music) vocals, you’re left feeling as if you’ve been sucked into a vacuum of nothing but harsh noise. One thing I especially admire about the music video is how the grainy effects of the camera complements the crustiness that comes from the distortion and high gain of the guitars. Together on top of the creeping pace of the track, it completes this aged aesthetic of pure agony and melancholy, mirroring the life events that everyone will eventually experience at some point throughout their lives. Vocalist/lyricist Stephen Murray had this to say about the inspiration for the track:
‘While the inspiration for “Leathern Cord” began with mummified bog bodies such as the 2,400 year old Tollund Man, the footage for the video (shot on Super 8 by Tomás Robertson) takes us to a different site of ancient ritual, the 5,000 year old Calanais Stones on the Isle of Lewis. Both the people performing human sacrifice in iron age Jutland and those tracing celestial bodies across the neolithic Outer Hebridean sky clearly had a firm purpose, likely spurred on by an equally firm set of beliefs. Yet now, whatever those beliefs might have been or how ardently they may have held to them, they did not weather the centuries as well as the bodies and stones themselves, and there is nothing left of them save mystery.’
Teach me to live that I dread the grave as little as my bed is a neat little proverb to keep in the back of your pocket as much as it will be an emotionally profound musical experience that’ll shake you to your core if you let it. Locusts and Honey‘s debut releases on May 24 via Hypaethral Records, so swing by their socials (Instagram | Bandcamp) in order to stay in the loop. Keep an eye out for a full review on the album from our site as well. If you dig anything doom/black metal/dark ambient, then this band and record label is precisely what you’re looking for, so eat up!
