Over the years, black metal has proven to be a surprisingly versatile style of music, blending well with other heavy genres and even having a huge aesthetic impact on pop culture with corpse paint makeup and dripping font branding.
Now, Texas-born avant-garde band Pyramids have taken things a step further and fused elements of black metal and reggaeton together in their new song, “Fools Gold (Mi Vida Ha Ido Pa Atras),” the first single from their forthcoming new album Pythagoras. If you’re expecting Mayhem crossed with J Balvin, you’re going to be disappointed because it’s a much more subtle blending. Hear the song for yourself below:
The first thing you have to say about this song is that it absolutely should not work — on paper, at least — but it does, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t highly infectious. To be fair, the song doesn’t just mash blast beat black metal and 808 reggaeton together into a weird mess of sound. It uses shoegaze/dream-pop guitar dynamics to help stitch the two together, like more of a Frankenstein’s monster type of song.
It starts off with those trippy riffs and some reggaeton drum beats, while singer Rich Loren Balling delivers smooth, beautiful vocals. Eventually, co-singer Emy Smith comes in with a kind of hip-hop delivery, keeping the reggaeton sound. Around the halfway point, those blast beat drum sounds I teased do actually show up, alongside some subtly screaming vocals masked with distortion.
Speaking about the song in a press release, Balling opened up about how he and the band were inspired to craft the genre-defying song. “One need only trace a simple lineage like Black Sabbath through Darkthrone to see that over time, music compounds itself towards the extreme, until one day it is so extreme and dense and noise-rich, that the brutal transitions into bliss,” he said.
“The sonic palette is then cleansed and the listener can start the cycle over again. It isn’t difficult to see the leap from Transilvanian Hunger to a work like Jesu’s Conqueror,” Balling continued. “I surmise that some of the most innovative music in the last decade has taken place in female pop, and even more specifically, in female neoperreo and reggaeton. After years of listening to extreme metal and harsh noise, this was my ground zero for the next reinvention.”
Pyramids’ Pythagoras is due out May 2 on The Flenser records. Click here to find streaming links and pre-order options.
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