Let’s discover Sea Sleeper together.
After spending its first ten years as Southgate, followed by another two as Crackling Dawn, the band adopted its current name in 2019 and began working on its new album, which was released in 2021. In 2026, Jesse Cooley (vocals/guitar), Shane Cooley (drums/vocals), Nick Kessler (bass/vocals), and Tony Spradlin (guitar/vocals) release their new album, Burden of Antler, in collaboration with Deep Signal Records.
An unsettling sampled voice opens Machines of the Bombing Runs, a lead track delivering an abrasive, unnerving sound with apocalyptic heaviness, complemented by the vocalist’s terrifying screams, creating a veritable vortex of oppression that blends Post-Metal and Deathcore. Even the clean-vocal break is unsettling, and although the band gives us a moment to catch our breath before Manifestor takes over with shrill harmonics that echo the hellish screams, sometimes launching into unstructured, dissonant solos that will tickle our eardrums. The track takes advantage of its length to regularly reignite the machine, and even though there’s a noticeable attempt to be reassuring, screeching sounds burst forth from this lull to lead us into Lunar Degenerates and its own massive riffs, from which new explosive leads emerge. The clean vocals set a soaring tone that the instrumental tends to follow at first, but the distortion returns with a vengeance before leading into Abysmal Trench which takes a more technical and controlled approach, while not hesitating to make full use of speed or, conversely, palm-mutes to create a delightful contrast. The calmer passages are quite unsettling this time around, leading into title track Burden of Antlers, which immediately picks up steam and relentlessly pounds us with an almost unpredictable syncopated rhythm section occasionally tinged with Prog elements, making the composition even stranger, then, with They’ll Miss You, the band delivers a relatively catchy darkness, though still as chaotic as ever and rooted in pure ferocity. Given the song’s title, one might have expected a touch of melancholy, but that’s not the case at all, and every moment is dedicated to our auditory destruction, though the sound does slow down briefly before moving on to Coma and its very short introduction, which erupts into flames after just a few seconds of calm. No one will be surprised if I tell you that the band shows no signs of stopping its relentless assault on our eardrums, and although there’s a slower passage here, it’s no less intense, just like the martial steady Husk, which finally offers some trippy touches paired with that distortion now familiar to our ears, as the musicians play around with different patterns right up until the very end.
Saying that Burden of Antlers is an abrasive album is one thing; listening to it in one sitting is quite another! Sea Sleeper isn’t the first band to experiment with such chaotic distortion, but the Oregon-based group is clearly one of the few that does so with such ferocity.
80/100
