DEAD SWORDS
Enders (3/8/19)

Dead Swords is the brand new, New Jersey-based outfit comprised of Alex Rosamilia of The Gaslight Anthem and Corey Perez (Bottomfeeder, I Am The Avalanche, Let Me Run). The brainchild of both Rosamilia and Perez, the band plays a ghostly kind of shoegaze, or, perhaps, a more soothing kind of black metal. Being released on Friday, March 8, 2019 on Human Blood Records, the band’s debut album, Enders, picks up where its two previous EPs and introductory showcase, Skeletons and Broken Souls, left off and is a record that's obsessed with both Disintegration & Loveless. Lyrically, the album also speaks to Rosamilia's continued fascination with death. In scope, the album is his overly morbid take on loss and what happens after we go.

Produced by Rosamilia and Perez with the help of Kevin Dye (gates), Enders presents itself as a highly ambitious recording featuring a large cast of contributors that include three bass players: Frank Marra, Darrell Coco, Mike Maroney (“Tonight”), Benny Horowitz of The Gaslight Anthem/Mercy Union/Antarctigo Vespucci (drums on “Tonight”), Erica Rosamilia (vocals on “Ender”), Trevor Reddell (drums on “Fumetsu”), poet Mischa Pearlman (“Interlude 04” and “Interlude 05”) and more. Leading the collection is the album’s closer, “Ender,” a widescreen, 11-minute journey that captures the very essence of what Rosamilia set out to accomplish with the band from the outset.

“When I started Dead Swords, I really wanted to focus on letting the music be able to breathe,” Rosamilia says. “I have always been a fan of bands like Pink Floyd, My Bloody Valentine, or The Cure – bands that write songs that sprawl about over the course of seven-t0-eight minutes. ‘Ender’, as well as the rest of the record, is my homage to those bands and those songs that take you for a 10-minute trip without you realizing how long you've been sat there."

Despite the torrent of guitars at the center of these funereal and nihilistic songs, there's hope and beauty in these songs too, dreams that refuse to succumb to the nightmare of the real world and the bleakness of our own ever-impending mortality. Listening to Dead Swords is like being lost in the loneliest darkness. Theirs is a world of overwhelming static and feedback, of eternities-long melancholy, of the purest beauty shrouded and obscured by the blackest night. It's the sound of being alive centuries before you were ever born.