“The Time Traveler’s Dilemma is compelling, toying with tech death tropes, and invading boundaries; across the album’s eleven tracks you’ll hear trace elements of jazzy time signatures, spaced out fuzz, and bizarre melodies.” – Toilet Ov Hell
The Time Traveler’s Dilemma, the long-awaited debut from New York-based death metal unit AFTERBIRTH, is out NOW via Unique Leader Records.
Stream the record in its entirety below.
AFTERBIRTH‘s The Time Traveler’s Dilemma is available on CD, digital, and vinyl formats. The record was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Joseph Cincotta at Full Force Studios (Suffocation, Dehumanized, Mortal Decay) and comes enclosed in the cover art of Kishor Haulenbeek (Black Harvest). The vinyl edition was mastered by James Plotkin (OLD, Scorn, Khanate, Khlyst et al). As an extra bonus, Frank Rini (ex-Internal Bleeding) performs backing vocals on the track, “Timeless Formless.”
For physical order bundles, go to THIS LOCATION.
Among the earliest purveyors of brutal death metal, AFTERBIRTH – featuring within its ranks members of Helmet, Artificial Brain, and Buckshot Facelift – was forged on Long Island, New York during the Summer of 1993. The following year, the band released the Psychopathic Embryotomy studio demo which has since become something of a cult-like classic among the extreme metal underground. Due to various issues among its members however, AFTERBIRTH disbanded shortly thereafter the recording.
After a near-twenty-year hiatus however, the band reunited in 2012 and began composing new material for an unknowable future and a then as-yet untitled debut. It became immediately apparent that the creative magic among the AFTERBIRTH members remained – it had never left – resulting in some of their heaviest and most dynamic material to date.
Not only was the music heavier and far more aggressive than it had been during the band’s initial short-lived run, but new elements like progressive metal, space rock, jazz, and noise began to rise to the surface of their song writing. Following a 2014 demo and 2015’s Maggots In Her Smile EP, AFTERBIRTH is set to release their debut with The Time Traveler’s Dilemma, an otherworldly combination of sounds that shift between the discordant and the melodious; the alluring and the disfigured; the eccentric and the methodical.
Heavy, complex guitar work; atypically inspired bass rumblings; skillful, fast, and tastefully groovy drums/percussion; otherworldly growls from beyond known dimensions of time and space… All of this and more combine to form the basis of AFTERBIRTH‘s current musical output. While the subject matter doesn’t stray too far from what some might call “typical” of the death metal genre – murderous grotesqueries, pain, and horrors unimaginable still certainly abound – the band’s vision has expanded far beyond the classic death metal template to include ideas and archetypes found in philosophical, religious, and scientific fiction/horror literature. “Just as our musical prowess had strengthened and amplified over the years,” notes the band, “so had our desires to express ourselves lyrically and conceptually. Gore and mutilated fetuses are always great and rich subject matter but we’ve all branched out and discovered other avenues of knowledge and inspiration we wanted to explore within the framework of the band.”
“An album meant to be heard from beginning to end, The Time Traveler’s Dilemma unfolds in grim and eerie ways as it moves forward. There’s much more than what appears initially, so give it a fair shake as it’s more of a grower than anything else. Enjoyable for those looking for a bit more out of their death metal than simply brutality. 8/10″ – Dead Rhetoric
“Will Smith’s subterranean gurgles and growls are gruesome enough to loosen the bowels of listeners, while the near-atonal, percussive hammer blows inflicted by the band are heavy and hard enough that they vibrate the spine, just as the cold, frenzied riff swarms signal an inhuman voraciousness, and the bullet-spitting drum eruptions could leave your dwelling walls looking like slices of Swiss cheese.” – No Clean Singing on “Drills And Needles”
http://www.facebook.com/AfterbirthNYDeathMetal
http://www.uniqueleader.com
http://www.facebook.com/UniqueLeaderRecords