The Afterimage – Eve

The Afterimage just released their debut album ‘Eve’ and it’s all I’ve been listening to the last couple days.  If you’re a fan of bands like Erra, Invent Animate, or A Skylit Drive you’ll find plenty to love here.

I’ve been into these guys since ‘Formless’ and am enjoying how they’re evolving.  Compared to their earlier material you can tell the band is no longer trying to squish a million different styles into every single song.  ‘Eve’ is more about diving deeply into each sound and the album cannot be understood by listening to only a couple songs.

The Afterimage is known for its incredible technicality, but I think Eve’s success will be from the band understanding that technicality isn’t everything.  They’ve clearly learned when to scale it back to make the album more digestible.  The sound they’ve achieved here will be appealing to a larger group of people while still showcasing their classic style.  You don’t need to be a massive progressive fan to enjoy it and I think that’s the key to the band’s future success.  At the same time, it’s as if they wrote “Wrath” for fans who miss the sound they had on earlier EPs. 

The atmosphere and the story of pain and loss on this album are great.  It isn’t surprising that the band had to scale back some of its technicality and heaviness to create it.  It’s interesting because that’s exactly what Reflections had to do when they made ‘The Color Clear’ which is one of the most emotional albums I’ve heard in the last five years.  It’s like the technicality can get in the way of the bigger picture, and I think The Afterimage did a great job of balancing the crazy music they’re able to write with the overall theme.

Although the band’s heavier extremes are rarer on ‘Eve’, they have more than made up for it with catchy choruses.  It’s unusual for clean singing to be my favorite part of a song but there are a couple instances of that happening here.  That being said, Kyle’s screams are still killer, like at the end of “Floodgates”, and I highly suggest you check out his side project called Brand of Sacrifice.  I never expected him to be able to pull off deathcore/slam vocals but he sounds like an absolute monster.

I’m happy these guys are getting some of the attention they deserve now that they’re on Tragic Hero Records, and I’m excited to see where they go from here.