Whether bands or individual musicians were writing specifically about their experience during the global pandemic, or simply recording music however they could manage—or maybe both—there exists a growing segment of musical history irrevocably touched by the events of the last two years. Creating new music can be an escape from it, a way to process it, or a way to just blow off steam. For French metallic hardcore quintet, Beyond the Styx, it’s probably all of the above. Poised to release their third album, Sentence, (recorded last July by Cryptopsy guitarist Christian Donaldson) they offer up a sneak preview of a one of the ten tracks via a video for the two-minute assault of “Overload.”
Sentence is set for release on February 4, 2022, and will be available on vinyl and CD (WTF Records), as well as cassette (Diorama Records). Preorders for both can be done here.
Vocalist Emile Duputié had this to say about “Overload”:
“This new song is a kind of testament to my experience with confinement. Namely, the ordeal represented by this period of incarceration where almost everything was forbidden to us except to work. Ubiquitous fear of the virus, asphyxiated by media pressure, oppressed by work, diminished by isolation, and confused by the absence of space-time. Fortunately, we were still allowed to think between two conservative and conspiratorial salvos.
“Work, consume, shut up! That’s all I take away from my last few ‘non-essential’ years. Overload!”
