With the countdown to Necrosonic Festival at The Mansfield Tavern in Brisbane on August 31 now on, HEAVY thought it appropriate to introduce you to the bands playing on the day, two at a time, starting from today until the day of the show.
Conjured by one of the dark architects behind the legendary Overcranked, Inferno and Dead of Winter Festivals, Necrosonic heralds a day filled with unrelenting brutality and the heaviest, most sinister sounds that the underworld has to offer, some even returning from the dead for the ritual.
Hosting 30 bands across three stages over 12 hours, Necrosonic Festival promises to satiate even the heaviest of hungers. Today meet LO! and 6OCK.
Tickets on sale now from https://necrosonicfestival.com/
LO!
Time to resound the trumpet as Australian blackened sludge veterans Lo! return with another grand infernal vision, captured in capital riffs and gargantuan grooves! After the universal acclaim of the band’s 2017 studio endeavour Vestigial the Australian interstate quartet show no intention of slowing down with The Gleaners, a soul-ripping hell-ride across nine visceral anthems; an affair of raw violence with a touch of sophisticated madness.
On The Gleaners Lo! firmly continue in the vein of their much-lauded third album, setting an over-arching storyline with multiple characters to a symphony of sonic death and destruction.
“Vestigial opened up the writing arena for Lo! in many ways,” explains guitarist and main songwriter Carl Whitbread about the predecessor of The Gleaners. “We created an album of anthems without losing the groove or viciousness of performing live, using defined characters and themes that are revisited and interwoven across the record, while also experimenting with atmospheric and cinematic samples to breathe life into the recording.”
“The act of gleaning was a medieval practice where a lord or nobility would allow their lowest subjects to sift through the refuse of a newly harvested field for subsistence,” continues Whitbread. “Replace grain with truth and we ourselves are gleaning daily through media, relationships and our own myths to subside; hoping to harvest sense from the muck and mire.”
However, don’t be deceived! At the base of The Gleaners lies a hardcore search for freedom and truth that leaves nothing to the imagination. From the one-two punch of album opener Our Fouling Larder and Salting the Earth to the d-beat destruction of Rat King and the massive culmination of Cannibal Culture, Lo! leave you little opportunity to catch your breath.
Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, the storyline of The Gleaners has little of a focal point, the characters crawl all over the place – its chaos is complete – but somehow its impact is phenomenal. Lo! have gone and done it again, creating a terrifying vision of the infernal madness of our reality that shakes you to your core!
6OCK
The boys from 6OCK hail from the Gold Coast, Australia and started jamming together in late 2021, however they have played in bands together in some form since the early 00s. Some of those include The Crisis Therapy, Hunt Muerto, Post Life Disorder, Dreamkillers, Sarah Joh and more.
The 6OCK sound is generally of the heavy sludge variety, and reflects the wide range of influences that have accumulated in their collective decade of experience. It is via straight-up walls of doom-laden riffs, off-kilter jarring noise and atmospheric post-metal passages, that they express poignant and/or twisted topics and feelings, personal or otherwise.
In late ‘22 the band started recording songs for an upcoming release. The drums were tracked at Core Studios with Nick Carpenter, while the rest of the instruments and vocals have been recorded and mixed by the band at their own Stu Stu Studio. The debut EP is available now.
