PRESSING INFO:

First Press

2571 x Electric Blue Standard Gram

547 x Royal Blue and White Galaxy Effect Merge Standard Gram *Relapse.com Exclusive*

347 x Bone White Standard Gram *North American Indie Retail Exclusive* (Not available through Relapse.com)

344 x White Inside Black Ice with Blue, Baby Blue and White Splatter Standard Gram *Relapse.com Exclusive*

214 x Milky Clear with Blue Ripple Effect Standard Gram *Band Exclusive - US Tour 2024* (Not available through Relapse.com)

208 x Black Ice with Metallic Silver Glitter Standard Gram *Band Exclusive - Roadburn 2024* (Not available through Relapse.com)

147 x Blue, Black and Bone White Tri Color Merge with Blue, Black and Bone White Splatter Standard Gram *Relapse.com Exclusive*

100 x Clear (Not available to the public - Friends of band and label only)

New Heaven, INTER ARMA’s latest album, is a compelling testament to perseverance, top to bottom. Its thicket of ever-dense layers of doom, death, and black metal occasionally let bits of light slip in, fleeting reminders to keep going amid the tumult. 

New Heaven marks a sharp turn for the band, showcasing some of the most extreme and angular songwriting INTER ARMA has ever laid bare. Known for their cinematic take on sludgy, extremely cavernous, and borderline psychedelic Metal, the Richmond band broadens their dynamics by seesawing between piledriving momentum and swirling oblivion.  New Heaven crushes and conquers, and illustrates what INTER ARMA can truly be.

Take the title track, with its hair-raising lead riff stemming from drummer/songwriter TJ Childers’ challenge to himself to write a nonsensically dissonant part that he ended up loving. The song spirals upward into a punishing Death-Metal march.  Meanwhile, vocalist Mike Paparo’s stentorian  bellows the bludgeon, above an impossibly complicated web of riffs and rhythms. From the get go, New Heaven and the opening title track eschews any restraint - INTER ARMA is completely unchained. 

Paparo’s keen and empathetic lyrics about innocent victims of war, addiction, and social apathy affirm that feeling, as a survivor grimaces at the carnage behind him and presses ahead best he can. “You stared into the brutish jaws of strife’s heartless device,” he growls into a chthonic blitz during “The Children the Bombs Overlooked,” a late-album powerhouse. “And you turned your back to hell.” That forward march out of madness is New Heaven in an armor-plated nutshell.

Though this is indeed another INTER ARMA triumph, it is not a triumphant album, meant to offer some glib or naïve assurance that everything will be fine. 

What evidence is there for that, really, either on a record where friends are forced into submission, addiction, suicide, or retreat to a world where suffering remains the lingua franca? No, INTER ARMA and New Heaven are too realistic and experienced for that. This is, instead, a record about enduring brambles and curses and lasting long enough to make something profound, honest, and even affirming about it all every now and again—exactly as INTER ARMA has on New Heaven.

Release date: April 26, 2024

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