Sickmind have released Babel Tower, ten tracks of groove and death metal, self released and on streaming now. The French quartet spent seventeen years as Silicium and changed the name for this record.
A new name after two EPs is usually a tidy way of starting again, and the band have been careful to make it mean something. Sickmind comes with a setting attached: a civilisation in its last days, the landscape after it, and ten songs that move through different parts of the same ruin. Collapse is the subject rather than the mood.
Two members of Gorod turn up on it, which for a self released album from Bordeaux is a useful endorsement. Nicolas Alberny plays on the opening While The Lights Are Still Shut and Julien Deyres sings on The Chaos Beneath Our Feet, and both are the sort of guest a band gets by being in the same scene for a long time rather than by paying for a feature.
The line up is Arthur Nouhaud on vocals, Maxime Roget on guitar, Thomas Darracq on bass and Antoine Fourre on drums. Nothing about the record is being sold as a reinvention of the band's sound, only of what it is called and what it is about.