“New Orleans orchestral metal band Anareta’s debut single is filled with despair. Opening with darkly beautiful strings, ‘Locality’ builds with intensity until vocalist Sarah Jacques wails into the air, ‘Harsh inscription / Writ on the gates of Hell.'” -Gambit
Anareta is a New Orleans based chamber-metal band combining western classical music structures and instrumentation with brutal, intense metal. This week the band has shared the first single, “Locality” from their debut album, ‘Fear Not,’ due out April 8th 2023.
Here’s what the band had to say about “Locality”:
“Locality was the first song to coalesce when we began crafting our sound in early 2018, so it feels exciting and appropriate that it is also the first single announcing the release of our debut album Fear Not. Through an evolving collaborative process, we combined our musical tastes to produce a sound both beautiful and harsh. The emotive qualities of this piece inspired us to draw lyric inspiration from Dante’s Inferno. Referencing a translation of this work, we present a perspective that questions his descriptions of the first layer of hell; what is the difference between this chaos and a mosh pit?”
You can listen to “Locality” below!
Stream “Locality” in Bandcamp
Stream “Locality” in Spotify
Anareta is a New Orleans based band that creates orchestral and cinematically intense metal. Led by a merciless string section fused with traditional metal instrumentation and anguished, howling vocals, the band offers a refreshing interpretation of heavy music. Anareta combines ordinarily disparate influences by blending layers of extreme harshness and graceful beauty. Their music is inspired by dark, metal atmospheres, Western classical composition structures, and a punk ethos.
Anareta began in 2018 as a collaboration of longtime friends and bandmates. Members Carey Goforth; guitar, Mackenzie Hamilton; viola, Sam Hollier; cello, Sarah Jacques; lead vocals and bass, Louise Neal; violin, and Boyanna Trayanova; drums, together merge a limitless range of musical experience and backgrounds. From Eastern European folk traditions, punk, traditional jazz and brass bands, extensive Western classical training, to second line parading, the band has built the symphonic equivalent of a cabinet of curiosities.
While each individual member has enjoyed years of eclectic, musical pasts, Anareta is only beginning. With four years in the making, the band’s music has been tried and tested in the New Orleans music scene and now their debut album, Fear Not will be shared with the world on April 8th, 2023.
