Unearth and Fit For An Autopsy
Inspired by what’s become known as the New Wave of Swedish Death Metal, Unearth debuted out of Boston in the early 2000s as kind of an entry-level Pantera, but with more denim and less leather. Several years of gigging allowed them to hone their chops enough to aspire for something more progressive than most underground metal bands are capable of, resulting in a 2008 concept album, The March, that impressed many, especially UK metal magazines like Kerrang, which gave it a 4-K review. That introduced them to a far wider marketplace than most stuck-in-the-sludge metalcore bands will ever see, carrying them into Billboard’s Hard Rock Top 10 with their 2011 album Darkness in the Light, which could be compared to Metallica’s so-called Black Album in the way it marked a conscious and canny dive into the deep end of the mainstream.
It’s been four years since their last full-length, Watchers of Rule, but the four founding members, recently joined by a new drummer, are about to drop a new album called Extinction on November 23. It’s so far preceded by singles for the anti-Xenophobia track “Incinerate,” as well as “Survivalist,” said to concern dealing with the diagnosis of a fatal illness. Its unusually cinematic lyric video is so filled with moving images that it really qualifies as a music video with subtitles. The support tour hitting Brick by Brick on November 29 includes New Jersey deathcore band Fit For an Autopsy, whose most recent album, The Great Collapse, was their first to crack the Billboard U.S. Top 200, albeit just barely, at number 199. It fared better on the Hard Rock chart, peaking at number 13.