Conflux Collective have released a video for The Antidote, the song that opens In The Wake of Saturn. The Circle Pit had it first.
Tommy McKinnon, who drums and writes, calls it the most demanding playing of his career, and the riffing underneath it comes from Chase Fraser, whose name turns up across a good deal of Canadian technical death metal. Eric Burnet of Derelict sings it, and the argument of the song is blunt: complacency is the condition, ignorance spreads on its own, and discipline is the only thing that works against either.
The album came out on 19 June and ended years of inactivity. Eight tracks that move between chaos, atmosphere and melody, built on nineties death metal ferocity with the precision of the modern technical school on top of it. The subject matter is personal rather than abstract: loss, addiction, ecological collapse, the work of rebuilding a self.
It is a collective in the literal sense. Jesse Brint, Mallika Sundaramurthy and Jeffrey Mott are among the singers who appear across the record, which for a band from Montreal with this many connections is less a guest list than a census.