Victoria K have released Incubus, the third song out ahead of their third album, and the Melbourne band are about to play the kind of support slots that decide whether a record like this travels: Katatonia at the Northcote Theatre, then three Australian dates with Paradise Lost in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
The song is where the band's drift is audible. The gothic and symphonic foundations are still the frame, but Incubus moves through ethereal passages into sudden heavy openings, with a short piano interlude in the middle and a structure that refuses the verse and chorus arrangement the genre usually keeps. The reference points the band names are Spiritbox, Evanescence and Lacuna Coil, which is three generations of the same idea in one sentence.
The subject is leaving something that has stopped meaning anything. Victoria Knight wrote it during a hard period and says it now reads differently to her, as growth rather than as grievance, which is a rare thing for a singer to admit about an old lyric.
What the album is promised to do is widen further, keeping the gothic and progressive metal base and bringing in modern metalcore, hardcore and electronics. Two albums in, that is either the record that defines them or the one that scatters them.