Darkest Hour have released Suffer Divine, their eleventh album and the first since Perpetual Terminal in 2024, with a video for Salvation.
Mike Schleibaum is unusually specific about what it is. "Suffer Divine is a love letter to melodic death metal," he says. "It's a guitar-focused record for sure, and you really hear the heightened guitar approach Nico and I have been developing over the past few records." He credits the rest of it too: John Henry's vocals, Deal's bass, and what he calls the insanity of Travis Orbin's drumming.
Mark Lewis produced it, which puts a man who has worked with Whitechapel, The Black Dahlia Murder and Cannibal Corpse behind a band that has spent thirty years refusing to sit in any of those boxes.
They came out of the Washington punk and hardcore underground in the mid nineties and arrived at melodic death metal from a direction almost nobody else took. Warrior came out three weeks ago. Henry told New Noise the band is "such a constant in my life that I can't live without" it, which after eleven albums reads less like promotion than explanation.