Inter Arma – New Heaven Review

By Cherd

It’s been almost exactly five years since Inter Arma’s last full-length, not counting their album of cover songs, Garbers Days Revisited. Not that the vicious take on Neil Young’s “Southern Man” wasn’t a welcome addition to their catalogue, but after the gut-churning aural ruination that was 2019’s Sulfur English, you could hardly blame fans for hoping the band would follow it up in short order. A global pandemic and personnel turmoil intervened, so here we are in 2024 just getting our ears around the band’s fifth LP, New Heaven. It seems Inter Arma used that time to do the most Inter Arma thing possible by leaning hard into their well-documented mercurial nature and producing an album that both sounds like them and a different band altogether simultaneously. They’re the same shaggy beast as ever, but beneath that matted, coarse coat is a rippling form mid-shape shift, stretching, pulling, and crossing back on itself constantly over the course of New Heaven’s shockingly concise 42 minutes.

You’d be forgiven for thinking you accidentally hit play on a new Portal record as you spin the opening title track. “New Heaven” is full of off-kilter skronk, starting with that lurching guitar line and the insane picking over it, but it’s also one of the most brutish songs the band has ever recorded, which is really saying something. The next two tracks continue the disgustingly heavy tone, cementing the band’s drift toward cavernous death metal that began back on Paradise Gallows. The tempos are faster here than on past releases, with “Violet Seizures” and “Desolation’s Harp” veering into war metal or grind territory at times. It’s not until the Southern rock-influenced interlude “Endless Gray” that longtime fans will be saying “There they are. I knew they were still Inter Arma.” The record’s second half lets up on the gas a bit to allow some of the weirder ideas to breathe. Speaking of weird, the echoey production and drum-forward mix combined with frequently warped guitar riffs make for an odd sense of sonic space. The result is an anxiously psychedelic experience that remains the same across wildly different styles, from the dissonant monster of an opening track to the entirely acoustic country closer “Forest Service Road Blues.”

If being all over the musical map sounds like a negative, you’ve probably never heard an Inter Arma record before. It seems whatever they throw at the wall sticks, and the listening experience across their (usually much longer) records never feels uneven. This is because they play everything with the same smoldering intensity and volatile mean streak. Case in point, the final three songs of New Heaven couldn’t be more different. “The Children the Bombs Overlooked” calls to mind tracks like “Howling Lands” from their back catalogue. Meanwhile, “Concrete Cliffs is basically a ‘roid raging Pink Floyd song with death roars. Finally, “Forest Service Blues,” with its sad sack cabin-dwelling recluse, could in concept and execution be cut from any Uncle Tupelo record. And yet, thanks to that trippy production job, TJ Childers’ insane drumming, and Mike Paparo’s constantly mutating vocal delivery, things couldn’t flow more naturally.

Speaking of Childers and Paparo, this record is the closest Inter Arma has come to capturing their live energy, thanks to both being front and center in the mix. If you’ve ever seen them play, your eyes are constantly moving from Childers’ ritualistic abuse of his kit to Paparo as he bellows, croons, screeches, and roars. The drumming on the record’s first half is especially impressive, propelling otherwise dirge-y songs like “Desolation’s Harp” into the stratosphere. By centering on Childers, New Heaven is the band’s least doom-leaning record to date. Paparo has always been a versatile vocalist, but he’s reached another level on the last couple of records. His low-pitched death roars in “New Heaven” and “Concrete Cliffs” are his best to date. On the album’s back half, his Nick Cave-ish clean singing lends a different kind of drama, though no less potent, than he delivers on the front half with his blackened shrieks.

It took me a while to wrap my head around this record. A lot of that had to do with the psychedelic production and the warped sense of space, but in the end, I realized this is exactly what sets New Heaven apart in the band’s impressive catalogue. This, and the near abandonment of doom metal, which you’d think would turn a doom head like me off, but this is Inter Arma we’re talking about. Almost 20 years into their career, I’d say they can do no wrong.

Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Relapse Records
Websites: interarma.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/interarma
Releases Worldwide: April 26th, 2024

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