Up and coming Sludge Metal band, Lowen, are due to play shows in London in the coming months, alongside Oak, Morag Tong and Gevaudan. Based in the UK, this three-piece are contributing to the re-growing scene of Doom Sludge Metal, but with their own unique embroidery of sounds that lean to the music of Dead Can Dance and Sisters Of Mercy.
12/09/2019 – The Black Heart – Camden Town, London (w/Oak)
10/10/2019 – 229 The Venue – London (w/Morag Tong & Gevaudan)
This past year has been an exciting time for the UK-based Doom Metal band. After releasing their debut album, ‘A Crypt In The Stars’ in July 2018, they spent this summer playing Sludgefest in Reading for the first time. Despite their smaller fan base, this band have been gaining lots of recognition amongst the Doom/Stoner scene in the UK. With clear influences from the musics of Sleep and Mastodon, Lowen have woven in their own unique blend of Ancient, Middle Eastern-inspired vocal melodies, with fantastic doses of grunge-y noise.
‘A Crypt In The Stars’, self-released via Bandcamp, is a wonderfully progressive doom record and evokes similar energies to Italian metal band, Messa, who also played The Black Heart in London back in 2017. Heavy, slow and distortion-driven guitars, paired with the spine-chilling melodies and cries from singer, Nina Saeidi, makes this album a truly mystical listen. A track that stands out to me is their final piece, ‘In Perpetual Bloom’, a very standard progressive length of 11 minutes, the listener is guided through lo-fi drones, wonderfully steady and heavy drums, overlapping thick, distorted guitars and bass, and lyrics that haunt – “And so I follow you, my last believer.” The band are relatively small at this point, only having formed in 2017, but they’re proving to be on the rise with their powerful and swirling sound and fans of Doom should be excited about what this band will go on to achieve from now.
The group are yet to post any more dates about gigs for the last few months of 2019, but they have been playing quite regularly this year, so it can be expected that they will add some more shows soon. They update their Facebook page often, so this will be a place to find out about future dates.
