When old friends Trey Suiter, Jeremiah Strange, and Cody McCall came together to start a new band, it was with the intention to create something heavy and original. Nashville’s RIFFT was born of the trio’s love of thick, crunchy amplifiers and gloomy melodies. Recruiting drummer Jason Witus, the band recorded 2 EPs – 2016’s Something Other Than the Earth and The Never Nowhere the following year. McCall, son of honky tonk hero Darrell McCall, learned from his father’s vocal harmony style and spliced it into the RIFFT DNA. These titans possess an imaginative relentlessness that isn’t easily defined by metal micro-categories, continuously expanding the palette they paint from. For the band’s third EP, Dead World Wanderer, Brad Elrod was drafted to play drums, who proved his mettle playing in Today Is the Day, making 3 genre-defining noise metal albums for Amphetamine Reptile Records. The four new RIFFT tracks were recorded at Dark Art Audio with producer Mikey Allred (All Them Witches, Inter Arma, Yautja) for a giant, spacious weightiness that never loses the band’s intimacy. The result is a post-apocalyptic nesting doll of sounds – each track revealing itself layer by layer to expose lush, proggy melodies, murky guitar distortion, melodramatic wails, and dynamic, unpredictable beats. - PJ Kinzer