Just weeks away from the release of their pummeling fifth album, I AM, metal provocateurs BECOMING THE ARCHETYPE are pleased to share another new track, “The Planet Maker,” exclusively via MetalSucks.
Armed with sweeping guitar leads and dueling growled and soaring vocals, “The Planet Maker” is a progressive ode to the guitar gods and gives fans another taste of what to expect when I Am hits stores September 18th from longtime label Solid State Records.
“‘The Planet Maker’ is our most proggy song on the record,” explains band nucleus Seth Hecox. “It reflects our love of progressive rock/metal and good, original songwriting. The song includes screaming and singing. It’s our most marketable singing on the record and the melody is in a style that is slightly new for BTA.”
Listen to ‘The Planet Maker’ at MetalSucks:
metalsucks.net/2012/09/06/exclusive-premiere-becoming-the-archetype-the-planet-maker/
“There are also some killer solos on this song, satiating the guitar nerds and the girls that require guitar gods to inhabit the bands that they unconditionally love,” Hecox deadpans. “To match the lyrics and concept of ‘The Planet Maker,’ there are some spacey elements to the music. The riffs harken to a sci-fi interest and feeling of new beginnings of a metaphysical nature.”
After building a career on dazzlingly artistic metal offerings and fresh off their most inventive album yet in 2011’s Celestial Completion, BECOMING THE ARCHETYPE have created their most baffling album yet in I Am. It’s an album that is baffling first and foremost because it’s not meant to be baffling. An album that is less about reinventing heavy music than it is reinventing BECOMING THE ARCHETYPE. Which isn’t to say listeners won’t find the band doing its usual mind-warping and genre-bending, but as Hecox explains, the point of this album wasn’t to transcend the artform of metal music, it was to master it.
“I AM is 100% head banging riffs,” Hecox says. “Gone are the sitars and horns of Celestial Completion. Instead, we’ve crafted an album full of the heaviest and most technical songs we’ve ever written.”
I AM is available for preorder now:
Recorded with producer Shane Frisby (BURY YOUR DEAD, THE GHOST INSIDE), I AM, as the title suggests, is also a statement of an album that puts a new stamp on who BECOMING THE ARCHETYPE is and what it stands for following an inter-band shakeup - one that cleared the path for Hecox to assemble a true dream team of musicians around him.
After seven years and four acclaimed albums with longtime label Solid State Records, BTA is in the unique situation of being an accomplished veteran band with a roster comprised largely of young, hungry, wildly talented musicians poised for their first real test on the national front. It’s a fact that isn’t lost on the band who are embracing this perceived new lease on life as an opportunity to both reinvigorate the band’s wide fan base and tap into a huge cross-section of metal fans who previously might have balked at BTA’s unbridled, manic creativity.