High On Fire – Slave The Hive
The Oakland stoner metal power trio return with a no-fat full-on early Christmas antidote. Includes queasy video!
YES, WE'LL SOON be posting our favourite Christmas records, and sure, the new Beyoncé album is a pop sensation, but at some point in this festive season you will be in a crowded department store or train, or stuck in a traffic jam on the M6 and you'll want to have access to the kind of track that will provide a bracing cathartic release for all that bottled-up festive rage and despair. Well, here it is. Complete with dystopian horror-hospital video.
Formed by Matt Pike in 1998 following the dissolution of his previous band, fabled stoner metal triarchy Sleep, High On Fire have occasionally crumbled under the weight of fan expectations but when they're at their peak, as they are here on this new single, the group have the ability to suck up dark energy and transform it into a righteous, elemental pummeling, the kind of fortifying experience I always imagined that our romantic hero is in search of in Caspar David Friedrich's Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer. Well, maybe him. Or do I mean this guy?
PHOTOS: Tom Couture