Chasms are set to release On The Legs Of Love Purified on October 14 via felte. The album is availabe to pre-order now on CD, LP & digitally in the felte Online Store. Today, the band has shared “Black Ice” from the forthcoming release with Stereogum. About the song the band says, “Lyrically, this song most represents the theme of the album. Love has the power to awaken you, to heal you. But it is not all you need. Humans are damaged, imperfect creatures. For as much beauty as love may birth, ugliness is unearthed. You must face yourself.” Stereogum raved, “[Jess] Labrador’s haunting, chilling harmonies float above moody, sustained, subtly distorted power chords and heavy drums, combining for an alluring, almost hypnotic, slow burn.”
Chasms is a San Francisco based project of Jess Labrador and Shannon Madden. The duo crafts percussive dirges that are at once beautiful and menacing. Labrador’s haunting vocals and hypnotizing guitar work wade between rhythmic bass lines and bursts of Madden’s stinging feedback, laid on a bed of pummeling drum programming. The band’s affinity for industrial rhythms, swelling textures, precise minimalism, and chaotic eruptions of noise sounds as equally informed by shoegaze as drone and doom metal—to choose just one would be a disservice.
“They conjure beautifully dark, transfixing songs with a deft control of mood and evocative sentiment.” – Stereogum
On The Legs Of Love Purified is the band’s proper debut full-length album. Written over the course of several years, the album explores the healing force of love and the exorcism of pain that inescapably accompanies it. Light cannot exist without dark, bliss without suffering. …Love Purified conjures this atmosphere of duality as it drifts through an expanse of emotion.
While this is Chasms’ debut, they’ve been an active duo since 2012. They’ve released the When It Comes EP (Dream, 2012), Riser (Dream, 2014) EP and the “Bad Evolution” single (Sleep Genius, 2012). They then collected a majority of the two EPs on the Subtle Bodies compilation album (Sleep Genius, 2014).
Chasms Tour Dates
10.07 Portland, OR @ Baker Building
10.08 Seattle, WA @ TBA
10.09 Eugene, WA @ Wandering Goat
10.10 San Francisco, CA @ TBA ^
^ w/ Odonis Odonis
Photo courtesy of Clarion Call (photo credit: Kristin Cofer)
