Of Virtue released their fourth album, Death Of The Altar, today through Arising Empire, with a video for Too Late arriving alongside it. The Michigan band are not sitting still to mark it: the European run starts the same day in Paris, then Tilburg on the 4th, Nijmegen on the 5th, Cologne on the 6th, Hamburg on the 7th, Berlin on the 8th, Munich on the 9th and Frankfurt am Main on the 10th. Eight shows in eight days with a record out on day one.
How it sounds: the riffs are the heavy end of what this band does, with industrial electronics under them and a lot of air in the production, and the two voices are the structural trick. Tyler Ennis and Damon Tate do not blend, they alternate, so the claustrophobic sections and the big choruses come from different throats rather than from one singer switching register.
The subject is in the title. The record is about devotion turning destructive, love turning into dependency, and what happens when the thing you give yourself to starts taking more than it returns. Religious imagery sits against grief, isolation and self-destruction, and the altar is whatever a person worships rather than a church.
It follows 2023's Omen, the record that moved this band out of the smaller rooms. The band's own history is in the lyrics too, as Ennis explained when Flatline came out.