New Jersey-based shoegaze band Dead Swords have released their debut album titled ‘Enders’. The brainchild of Alex Rosamilia of The Gaslight Anthem and Corey Perez of Bottomfeeder and Let Me Run, the band plays a ghostly brand of shoegaze, or, perhaps, a more soothing kind of black metal, expansive in both purpose and ambition. Take a listen to the album via Bandcamp below.
Out now 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. Stream the album in full on Spotify here.
Rosamilia had the following to say about the album and ambition behind it:
“When I started Dead Swords, I really wanted to focus on letting the music be able to breathe. 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. This album 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.
