Black Satellite’s second album wants to be knife-sharp, and sometimes succeeds, but ends up feeling bloated…
Some pandemic-era albums had their releases pushed back by a few months. Black Satellite’s lay dormant for years. In that time, it’s not merely sat gathering dust – behind the scenes, the New York metallers continued writing, expanding what they’d started with. It’s an understandable choice in unusual circumstances to preserve its freshness – one song, the emotionally tempestuous Void, has been out in the world now for five years – but the finished product has ended up becoming unwieldy.
The vision they’re presenting of a dark, industrial-streaked metal record is clear, elevated by the rather unique razor-like vocals of Larissa Hale. It’s impressively consistent given how it was made, but its quality wavers. Disengaged’s roiling riffs and lithe melodies have a glint of anthem quality about them, and Here It Ends’s snaking, anthemic chorus accomplishes the same in even stronger fashion, but it’s a shame those peaks aren’t matched elsewhere.
Decay wants to be a pummelling, hard-hitting track but doesn’t quite have the soul behind it to back itself up, Imperfectly You’s lack of new ideas means it sounds like the band is just treading water, while the title-track struggles to be more than a plodding ballad.
Other times, Black Satellite huddle a little too close to their influences. Broken barely conceals its debt to the more menacing end of Korn’s sound, and is solid but nowhere near as individual as they'd hope. Elsewhere, Doom Or Die languishes in the shadow of Motionless in White’s stomping horror-laced formulas, and Downfall is a little susceptible too, but its hulking riffs still make it one of the strongest tracks here.
The other primary issue with Aftermath is that it suffers from being just too long. Without strong enough hooks to give it some more dynamite, it begins to drag and struggles to justify its 15-track duration. There are some good ideas, but there’s too much to sift through to access them.
Verdict: 3/5
For fans of: Korn, Jinjer, Motionless In White
Aftermath is released on September 5
