Long-running exploratory label Crucial Blast announces the May 15th release of My Death Is More Beautiful Than Your Life, from atmospheric synth-doom duo MY HEART, AN INVERTED FLAME.
A wave of lunar heaviosity, My Death Is More Beautiful Than Your Life is the sophomore album from MY HEART, AN INVERTED FLAME – drummer Andee Connors (A Minor Forest, Common Eider, King Eider, Aquarius Records) and synth/electronics/vocalist Marc Kate (I Am Spoonbenderm P.E.E. and J-Church) – delivering another slab of their signature tectonic synth-doom. Despite what appears to be a spare sound palette and dispensing with the use of guitar and bass, the duo’s sound is utterly immense and wrought in dark emotional intensity, sprawling across nearly eighty minutes of morose slow-motion grandeur. The ten songs lumber through the duo’s signature haze of electronic luminescence and earth-shifting percussion, crafting each one into a massive slab of ultra-heavy glacial drift. It would be too simple to describe this as “drone metal” – MY HEART, AN INVERTED FLAME evokes a moonswept ambience that offers something lusher and radiant, lending moments of dreamlike beauty to the gravitational crush. Likewise, this transcends the banner of doom metal; while Connors flattens everything in sight with his colossal sledgehammer drumming, the blown-out electronic textures of Kate’s synthesizers and FX delirium pulls the sound into a kind of cosmos-devouring psychedelia, with swells of saturated cinematic majesty billowing across the rupturing percussive dirge.
The drums thunder in the deep, laying down monumental backbeat awash in swirling, squealing, searing electronic noise and howling Berlin School-esque melodic forms. But they also roll and stutter monstrously, Connors rending the blackness with sudden bursts of seemingly freeform power as often as he locks into a mesmeric slowcore groove or bone-shattering dirge. Between the active percussive blast and epic choral synth on tracks like “My Body, My Problem,” the evil distant screams that float through “You. Alone.,” and the stop-start caveman hammer of “Necrosomethingology,” the band evokes deep, dolorous depths of black drift, hyper-distorted drones, over-modulated glitch, and gut-rupturing earthquake reverberations. This stuff is heavy as hell but powered by an occasional Teutonic drive that immerses the lumbering weight in a hypnotic haze that emits its own unique effect. This is brought full-force on the eighteen-minute saga “No And Never,” where MY HEART, AN INVERTED FLAME pushes into an agonizingly propulsive magma groove that brings all the album’s most hypnotic elements together in grandiose style. A steady, elephantine backbeat drives waves of feedback, distorted chordal crush, luscious electronic hum, pulsating bass lines, and glimmering keyboard melodies, into a kind of monstrous motorik hypno-sludge epic. Sweeping and sumptuous, and the centerpiece of the album. Almost like some stretched-out ‘80s-era post-punk slowed and transformed into something demolishing in its mesmeric intensity The three songs that then round off “My Death” disgorge you back into the depths, drowning the listener in more grim and bleary distorted dirge, those vicious blown-out vocals howling in the deep, the sound balanced on the edge of utterly oppressive darkness and sky-climbing electronic textures. Harrowing, even hellish. Navigating purgatorial chasms and noise-damaged bliss. Ending the album in a depth charge blast of explosive percussion amid billowing shadows and restrained, expansive space. Closing with the equivalent of a sepulcher caving in on itself.
Often achingly beautiful, but relentlessly heavy, the duo seemingly channels the blissful filmic dream-drift of Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh and the hypnotic throb of both modern minimalism and vintage psychedelia as easily as the corrosive, crustal crush of Corrupted, Khanate, and Black Boned Angel and the bleary dreariness of funeral doom icons like Thergothon and Skepticism. Leaning further into an experimental and adventurous pursuit of catastrophic sound. An almost ritualistic trance-state of stripped-down drumming and dense electronic layers.
My Death Is More Beautiful Than Your Life was recorded at The Lost Room, mixed at Crowbar Corner, mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate, Earth, Gnaw), and completed with art by Andrew McLeod.
Stream MY HEART, AN INVERTED FLAME’s “This Has Always Been The Disappearing Floor” on YouTube HERE and Bandcamp HERE.
My Death Is More Beautiful Than Your Life will be released on CD, limited cassette, and digitally on May 15th. Find preorders at the Crucial Blast webshop – CD HERE and cassette HERE – and Bandcamp HERE.
My Death Is More Beautiful Than Your Life Track Listing:
1. Every Step Is Corpsed
2. My Body, My Problem
3. Whispers In Dead Languages
4. Yes (__________)
5. Necrosomethingology
6. You. Alone.
7. No And Never
8. Some Leave Forever. Some Leave Forever Through Memory. Some Leave.
9. This Has Always Been The Disappearing Floor
10. We Forgot Who We Wanted To Become
The band is currently booking Summer 2026 live dates and a West Coast tour in support of the album. Expect further live details, additional previews of the record, and more to be posted shortly.
MY HEART, AN INVERTED FLAME:
Andee Connors – drums
Marc Kate – synths, effects, vocals
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