Dead Swords, the New Jersey-based outfit comprised of Alex Rosamilia of The Gaslight Anthem and Corey Perez of Bottomfeeder and Let Me Run, are proud to announce the band’s debut album titled ‘Enders’. The brainchild of both Rosamilia and Perez, the band plays a ghostly brand of shoegaze, or, perhaps, a more soothing kind of black metal, expansive in both purpose and ambition.
Being released on March 8, 2019 via Human Blood Records, the debut showcase picks up where its two previous EPs, ‘Skeletons’ and ‘Broken Souls,’ left off and is a record that’s clearly inspired by and obsessed with both ‘Disintegration’ & ‘Loveless’. Lyrically, the album also speaks to Rosamilia’s continued fascination with death. In scope, the album is his overly morbid take on loss and what happens after we go. Take a listen to the album’s first single Ender via Soundcloud below.
Lead by Rosamilia and Perez with the help of engineer/producer Kevin Dye (gates), ‘Enders’ is a highly determined recording featuring a cast of contributors that include three bass players: Frank Marra, Darrell Coco, Mike Maroney (Tonight), Benny Horowitz of The Gaslight Anthem/Mercy Union/Antarctigo Vespucci (drums on Tonight), Erica Rosamilia (vocals on Ender), Trevor Reddell (drums on Fumetsu), poet Mischa Pearlman (Interlude 04 and Interlude 05) and more. Leading the collection is the album’s closer, Ender, a widescreen, 11-minute journey that captures the very essence of what Rosamilia set out to accomplish with the band from the outset.
“When I started Dead Swords, I really wanted to focus on letting the music be able to breathe,” Rosamilia says. “I have always been a fan of bands like Pink Floyd, My Bloody Valentine, or The Cure; bands that write songs that sprawl about over the course of seven-t0-eight minutes. ‘Ender’, as well as the rest of the record, is my homage to those bands and those songs that take you for a 10-minute trip without you realizing how long you’ve been sat there.”
Despite the torrent of guitars at the center of these funereal and nihilistic songs, there’s hope and beauty in these songs too, dreams that refuse to succumb to the nightmare of the real world and the bleakness of our own ever-impending mortality. Listening to Dead Swords is like being lost in the loneliest darkness. Theirs is a world of overwhelming static and feedback, of eternities-long melancholy, of the purest beauty shrouded and obscured by the blackest night. It’s the sound of being alive centuries before you were ever born.
‘Enders’ track listing
Sometimes
Waiting
Black
Fumetsu
Interlude 04
Tonight
Letters
Hook
Perception
Interlude 05
Ender
