The sparrows have been chirping it from the rooftops for a while, but now it's official certainty: in 2024, VENUES will unfold to their full size for the first time. And we're all here to witness it live. In short: With their third album "Transience," the band effortlessly shifts the boundaries of what's possible in modern metal. After the two strong benchmarks "Aspire" and "Solace," which oscillated somewhere between post-hardcore, alternative metal, and metalcore, the Stuttgart-based band definitively tears down all barriers, boundaries, and bulwarks. "Transience" unleashes an emotional cascade full of grand melodies, visionary soundscapes, abyssal hardness, and raw, unfiltered emotion. This is not just an album. It's catharsis. Medicine for a sick world. The antidote to dreariness, indifference, coldness.
It's anything but a matter of course that VENUES are still standing. Old members left, the band was hit hard by the pandemic like everyone else; but from a long dark tunnel emerged a band that somehow only became bigger, stronger, more fearless through all setbacks, stumbling blocks, disasters. "Since our last album, we've grown enormously as a band," confirms shouter Robin Baumann. Since 2019, he has shared vocals with the wonder voice Lela Gruber, who has given VENUES a tremendous boost and belongs to the most versatile, strongest voices in modern metal. A voice like an axe for the frozen sea within us. "We're all pulling in the same direction and can talk openly about everything," she says. "This has brought a whole new vibe and an insane energy into the band."
You hear it, you feel it: The ten songs of "Transience" revolve around transience, about farewell, new beginnings, and the inevitability of change, are emotional projectiles that hit exactly where they hurt the most: In our wounded hearts. Recorded in three creative and harmonious sessions with their regular producer Christoph Wieczorek (Annisokay) at the Sawdust Recordings in Halle, the Stuttgart band's third album carries all the pain of a wounded world within it. VENUES do not look away, repress nothing, sugarcoat nothing. Yet, they also do not give up on themselves or this world and sing, scream, play against the feeling of powerlessness. They do not close their eyes to toxic relationships ("Unspoken Words"), they channel emotional baggage ("Godspeed, Goodbye"). But VENUES are most moving in their most intimate moments. When Robin addresses his mother's cancer in "Braille" or Lela sings about captivity in the oppressive "Coming Home." "I have yet to manage to sing this song without crying," she says softly.
This vulnerability, this empathy leads to an incredibly intense, at times painfully honest album that draws from post-hardcore, alternative rock, and electronic prisms. A healing storm. "When I think back to my 16-year-old self, who sat sadly in his room drowning in music, I only then realize what we are actually doing here and that today we are that important band for some people," says singer Lela. And today more than ever: The grandeur of Bring Me The Horizon occasionally goes hand in hand with the symphonic arena demolition of In This Moment, interwoven with a sound that has finally become a distinctive trademark by album three. "Transience" is a camera obscura, a prism, composed of numerous shimmering facets and made immortal by a band at a new creative and musical peak. "Our last album was a pretty hard metal record as a reaction to our debut; this time we wanted to be as open and multifaceted as we are as individuals," Robin says. "This album sounds the way we always wanted to sound."