ROT COVEN is a two-piece, noise-drenched industrial death metal/sludge band from Pennsylvania.
MZ sings and plays bass and drums while DD focuses more on guitar, then both members slather everything in layers of noise boxes, scrap metal, ritual drums and processed field recordings. This duo has been creating music together in various bands for around twenty years.
Born of a lifelong love of cosmic horror, heavy riffs, and creeped-out industrial noise, the band that would become ROT COVEN first saw the light of day during the COVID-19 lockdowns of spring 2020.
The initial idea was to fuse ominous dark ambient synth textures with pounding “doom” style drums, but bass, guitars, vocals, and scrap metal percussion were quickly added to the mix resulting in a room-shaking cacophony equal parts Autopsy, Chu Ishikawa and the slow crawling No-Wave dirges of early SWANS.
ROT COVEN’s first physical release Nightmares Devour the Waking World pairs two full-length albums: Phase I (initally self-released through the duo’s bandcamp) and the unreleased follow-up Phase II. Phase I builds colossal sludge riffs out of lurking death industrial dronescapes with the final track erupting into a supernova of scorching psychedelic leads and almost “doomgaze” melodicism, while Phase II descends deeper into the abyss, adding elements of unrelentingly ugly death metal to their apocalyptic scum-dirge.
Of our video premiere, ‘Accretion Disk Necropolis’, the band write:
The lyrics to ‘Accretion Disk Necropolis’ are based around this weird dream I had where there was this sprawling “graveyard” of used up/ uninhabitable planets, derelict vessels, and all this broken space-tech slowly being swallowed up by a monstrous living black hole.
For whatever reason the image really stuck with me and I’d find myself daydreaming about it whenever I’d have downtime at work or wherever, after a couple days I was like: “Man, we gotta get a song out of this.”
It took a while to get this one firing on all cylinders ‘cos I fractured a metacarpal back in December and that put me out of commission for a lot longer than I would have liked, but once everything finally “clicked” we were both super happy with how it turned out… It feels like this one ties together a lot of threads from a bunch of different bands we’ve been in over the past 20 years and it also feels like it kind of sets the stage for where we’d like to go with our next album.
This also wound up being the last track on the album so we wanted it to sound absolutely massive, all consuming, like getting sucked into a black hole and crushed to nothingness… I don’t know if we pulled it off but I do know that the day after we finished recording my vocal chords were absolutely shredded and my bass amp wouldn’t turn on anymore so I’ll take that as a good sign.
Nightmares Devour the Waking World is released on August 15 2024 via Aesthetic Death Records and can be pre-ordered HERE
