Acclaimed post-metal band THE OCEAN return to Australia this June for their first headline tour in almost a decade. The Germany-based group stunned audiences across the nation on their 2023 tour with Ne Obliviscaris and Rivers of Nihil, but couldn’t wait to follow up and cement their glory with their biggest Australian production yet and a tour package of their own featuring the legendary US metal/hardcore pioneers CAVE IN for their first-ever Australian shows, and insanely heavy Danish label mates LLNN.
2023 also saw the release of the band’s ninth album Holocene – the heavily conceptual collective’s most exploratory and varied release yet – and the conclusion of the paleontological era they began with 2018’s Phanerozoic I: Paleozoic and continued with 2020’s Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic / Cenozoic. Having flirted more with extreme metal influences on these records than ever before, the arrival of Holocene saw the band – lead by guitarist and mastermind Robin Staps – forge a new path into a world of looped electronics and more subtle melodic experimentation while philosophically reflecting on humanity as always, this time on the nascent realities of a post-pandemic world.
Formed in 1995 in Massachusetts by singer/guitarist Stephen Brodsky, CAVE IN was ahead of its time from the very beginning, helping to define the then-primitive metalcore genre with a more creatively elevated slant on their 1998 debut album Until Your Heart Stops. Not content to remain pigeonholed, the band veered into more accessible psychedelic ‘space rock’ sounds on subsequent releases before a brief hiatus in the mid 2000s. After the tragic death of bassist/vocalist Caleb Schofield in 2018, Converge bassist Nate Newton picked up his friend’s instrument and the band was able to continue on its legacy, resulting in their seventh album – 2022’s Heavy Pendulum (Relapse Records) – a culmination of all the sounds the band had explored throughout their tenure and then some, with universal critical praise labeling it everything from sludge metal to post-grunge and even thrash.
Rounding out this trio into a certified powerhouse of thinking man’s metal with some unsubtle bludgeoning, Denmark’s LLNN sound like the apocalypse on steroids. Signed to THE OCEAN’s own Pelagic Records, this absolutely crushing four piece unleash vicious sonic textures atop of a percussive barrage of unhinged rhythmic destruction. Three albums deep, 2021’s Unmaker is a pillar of sonic force so insanely heavy that words fall short.
