Scarcity Share “Venom & Cadmium” Music Video
The song appears on their new album The Promise of Rain, incoming July 12th from The Flenser.
“avant-garde black metal chaos” – BrooklynVegan
The Promise of Rain, the sophomore album of the experimental black metal band Scarcity, is an embodiment of the hard-to-believe truth that burdens are easier to bear when distributed, a realization Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble) grappled with extensively while writing this record. This is a sweat-drenched album about dispersion, about spreading, about the collective relieving of burdens through shared experience: you don’t have to go through everything alone.
Today, the album’s pummeling second single “Venom & Cadmium” arrives alongside a performance music video directed by Derrick Belcham. Randall-Myers comments on the track, “I wanted to work with melody as a primary compositional element. I ended up writing something pretty riff- and groove-forward; more like a song than anything I’d written for Scarcity previously.” Moore adds, “Is this the world’s first microtonal black metal song with a gang-shouted chorus? Signs point to yes.”
When Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut was written in early 2020, Randall-Myers and vocalist Doug Moore (Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) never expected to be able to play their songs live. The cathartic experience of playing something that came from a place of isolation out to people in a live setting is the root of the intensity in The Promise of Rain.
The Promise of Rain begins where the craziest climaxes of Aveilut end, and is the first Scarcity record to include Tristan Kasten-Krause (Sigur Ros, Steve Reich, LEYA) on bass, Dylan Dilella (Pyrrhon) on guitar and Lev Weinstein (Krallice) on drums. Rather than building density with the quasi-orchestral layering on Aveilut, Scarcity challenged themselves to document what five people in a room could do, recording most of The Promise of Rain in one or two takes, capturing the physical effort and urgency of a live performance.
Scarcity forges a completely fresh sound in The Promise of Rain with their alarming guitar work and melodic arpeggiating, shedding dead skin and breaking ground with sheer vulnerability. The lyrics for The Promise of Rain were inspired by a trip Moore took to the high deserts of southern Utah in 2023. “To thrive in the desert is an act of abnegation –” he observes, “you do right by the land and receive its gifts, or it does away with you.” The necessity of adaptation is as evident in the desert as it is to the landscape of the human experience. The transformation of ideas and beliefs, the grief of losing relationships that had to end, and the fear involved in forming new ones under the grip of mental illness is conjured over and over again on this panoramic album.
Pre-order The Promise of Rain here.
The Promise of Rain, track listing:
- In the Basin of Alkaline Grief
- Scorched Vision
- Subduction
- Undertow
- Venom & Cadmium
- The Promise of Rain
For more on Scarcity:
