Time may move in a circle, but we pick up wisdom along the way. When we face similar situations further down the line, we’re armed with the experience to not only survive, but actually thrive. Between The Buried and Me built their influential 2007 album, Colors, on an unwavering commitment to artistic integrity. They’ve only fortified that commitment on its 2021 sequel, Colors II [Sumerian Records]. The circumstances surrounding both records bear key similarities, yet the North Carolina quintet—Tommy Rogers [lead vocals, keyboards], Paul Waggoner [lead and rhythm guitar, backing and lead vocals], Dustie Waring [rhythm and lead guitar], Blake Richardson [drums], and Dan Briggs [bass, keyboards]—once again stretch the boundaries of their signature sound and heavy music at large. “Especially with 2020, we really wanted to give it all we could and show the world we’re still here,” explains Tommy. “That’s part of the reason we named it Colors II. We were in a similar spot when we did the first Colors. Back then, we had just gotten done with OZZfest. We were wondering, ‘Where do we belong in this music scene?’ We still struggle with that. At both of these moments in our career, we decided to just be ourselves and write the best album we can. We came out guns blazing, and I feel like it’s some of our most creative material in a long time.” “Colors was very much our attempt at a do-or-die statement,” recalls Paul. “We had to establish our identity and be who we really wanted to be in order to have a career. This time around, our industry was shutdown for a year. Once tours were cancelled due to the Pandemic, we were like, ‘We’ve got to write a record, and it’s got to be good’. We had to do something next level.” They did so with nearly 20 years of hard-earned experience behind them. Their fourth offering Colors represented the first in a series of high watermarks. It graced numerous tastemaker lists, including KERRANG!’s “The 21 Best U.S. Metalcore Albums of All Time,” Prog’s “The 100 Greatest Prog Albums of All Time,” ThoughtCo’s “Essential Progressive Metal Albums,” and Loudwire’s “Top 25 Progressive Metal Albums of All Time” and “Top 100 Hard Rock and Heavy Metal Albums of the 21st Century.” In its wake, 2015’s Coma Ecliptic opened at #12 on the Billboard Top 200 and received a perfect rating from The Guardian. During 2018, they unleashed the two-part Automata I and Automata II to further acclaim. Along the way, the group toured with everyone from Mastodon and Coheed and Cambria to Lamb of God and Devin Townsend in addition to selling out headline shows around the globe. Throughout 2020, the band members wrote remotely before congregating in Winston-Salem, NC with longtime producer Jamie King. Instead of adhering to a conceptual thread, the conditions gave the concept meaning. “Musically, it flows like a sequel to Colors, but it wasn’t just another version of that album,” Tommy goes on. “On the original, I was analyzing myself and analyzing humanity. With last year, I was in a perfect position to do that. I wrote lyrics in the same way, but they felt new. It was more of a real-world concept by virtue of making a continuation.” They introduce the album with the pummeling single “Fix The Error.” Galloping thrash drums collides with a wah-ed bass solo and carnival-esque keys before launching into gritty verses. It twists and turns towards a hardcore chant punctuated by topsy-turvy vocals and mind-numbing fretboard fireworks underpinned by drum solos by an ironclad trifecta of Mike Portnoy, Navene Koperweis, and Ken Schalk. “The intention was to write a metal song with a big gospel vibe,” smiles Tommy. “It turned into this monster. It’s a small story on the record about this guy who lives in a big apocalyptic city. He retires from his job, but he wants to take down this huge corporation. The song is a celebration of taking down corruption and saying, ‘Fuck you’, to the man. It’s about as punk as we’ll ever get.” Meanwhile, the nine-minute “Revolution In Limbo” steamrolls through frenetic keys with fascinating guitar movements and a head-spinning vocal ebb-and-flow. “The songs are meant to flow in and out of each other like one big chunk of music, creating a seamless and chaotic musical journey,” the frontman observes. Between The Buried and Me encode various “easter eggs” for fans of the original Colors inside of the opening salvo of “Monochrome” and “The Double Helix of Extinction,” while “Bad Habits” calls back to the lyrics of “Ants Of The Sky” with the line, “Sleep on…fly on.” “There are a lot of fun nuggets,” Paul continues. “You’ll hear certain instrumental parts and lyrics that remind you of Colors. Everything comes full circle.” In the end, Colors II sees Between The Buried and Me make a similar connection. “Music’s purpose is to help,” Tommy eaves off. “That’s a big theme of this album. Once our songs are done, they belong to our listeners. Maybe this will help them move forward creatively or in life.” “I hope audiences get a feeling similar to what they got when Colors came out,” Paul concludes. “This is a full 80-minute album experience. For years, fans have told us how much they loved Colors. I hope they feel the same way about Colors II.”

What started as an earnest foray into pushing the boundaries of fledging math-rock, over the course of thirteen years has morphed into something much more for Canterbury (via Brighton) quartet Delta Sleep. Continuously surprising their listeners with every release by constantly tweaking and perfecting their sound, so far the bands expansive repertoire defies to be constrained by any strict sub-genre or category: moulding their sound into something that goes beyond the labels of just math-rock.   In 2018 Delta Sleep’s second full length album ‘Ghost City’ saw them approach their intelligent songwriting with guitar driven melodies over jazz influenced grooves — a tech-noir wherein the world now operates as one city in a collective consciousness under the rule of vast tech firms and organic nature and wildlife are a thing of the past — which garnered them considerable support from fervent fans and critics alike, with Gold Flake Paint describing the band as “like a soundtrack to some blissful utopian dream”. The result of their daring, future-facing process catapulted them to stages across three continents, touring the US & Canada, Asia — including Japan, Philippines, Thailand and Singapore — as well as hitting Europe on Mineral’s 20th anniversary tour.   The record’s success also saw them land #1 on the Bandcamp Rock Chart and reach over 5M streams on Spotify by the time the year was out. Undeterred to take a breath, the band followed up with Ghost City Rarities EP (featuring Tricot) and during their EU tour with Mineral in 2019, they took a rare day off in Dortmund and booked into a rehearsal space. Having messed around with a few ideas on the road, the rehearsal day gave the band a chance to shape those ideas into something tangible, resulting in the surprise drop of their  EP ‘Younger Years’.   Delta Sleep released their 2020 live album 'Soft Sounds’, coupled with a video series that was filmed over the course of four years around the world: in Paris, Tokyo, Turkey, Brooklyn, Dallas, Texas and Los Angeles and features intimate unplugged performances of songs taken from their back catalogue and were due to head out on another lap of the UK, US, Asia and South America before COVID forced them to pause.   Over the summer of 2020 Delta Sleep locked themselves away in Grouse Lodge Studio in Ireland to begin working on their third album ‘Spring Island’, taking the time to focus on teasing new material all together in a live room for the first time since their last recordings on a fresh slate. Touching on themes of global warming and the effects humans are having on the world, the new album is a concept album in typical Delta Sleep terms: blending their bleak lyrical content to sit on top of a bed of dizzying, uplifting and complex grooves, captivating instrumentation and sweeping ambience.   “For the first time in our career we wrote a song totally from scratch as a full band in one sitting. The first single 'The Detail' was the first idea we came up with at our first practice after not being in a room together for nearly six months. It quite literally came out of nowhere and we had the bulk of the song and structure down within a couple of hours. That song holds a very special memory for all four of us,” says bassist Dave Jackson. “It also touches on human struggle and the deep depression we can often find ourselves in. This album certainly represents some of the struggles we've all encountered over the last 15 months or so and the effect that isolation can have on us as living breathing creatures who crave interaction.”    For Delta Sleep, ‘Spring Island’ is the culmination of years honing in on their craft and pushing their songwriting boundaries to become pioneers among their contemporaries. Due out in 2021 as a self released record on their new label Sofa Boy Records, Delta Sleep’s stratospheric return is one that’s a welcome addition to the world anew — a cathartic endeavour wrapped in sonic excellence that is one of their most exciting releases to date.