Kylesa performed on opening night of The Jinx, and the Savannah-based metal/rock/hard-to-pigeonhole band will play The Jinx’s 12th anniversary on October 9th as they tour in support of their new album Exhausting Fire.
Click here to stream Exhausting Fire and to buy the new album on clear vinyl, cassette, or CD.
You can read Do Savannah’s coverage of Exhausting Fire here and here. And click here for Connect Savannah’s interview with Kylesa’s Laura Pleasants (one of the band’s three core members along with Phillip Cope and Carl McGinley), who says this about the new album:
I feel that it’s definitely a sum of all of our parts. All the strong elements we’ve ever used are there: from the old-school, the heavy drop-tune guitar, a lot of the heavy riffs are back that were maybe not present on the other. The icy, gothic tones are there, the psychedelic meanderings are there: all of the things that make Kylesa Kylesa are there. It’s maybe a bit more sophisticated and focused.
From Spin (with an allusion to Kylesa’s up-and-coming Retro Futurist label):
Exhausting Fire is far more alt-rock than metal (and still more stoner-rock than it is crust-punk); the grungy vibe works for the trio, and pulling back from doom gives them more space to get weird. While their earlier output was often lumped into a crowded geographic scene, Kylesa’s always been a different beast than the vintage rockers in Mastodon or prog-loving Baroness. With this new album, they finally sever those last few ties, and forge ahead into the retro future.
From Metal Injection:
As consistent and of-a-piece as the album is as a whole, though, I find myself coming back to those two instant classics, “Growing Roots” and “Night Drive”, either one of which should immediately qualify as encore material in the band’s setlist.
From Consequence of Sound:
On the outfit’s seventh album, Kylesa again reinvent themselves as a music box of stoner psych and alt metal dabbling. 2013’s Ultraviolet was a hesitant test run, a toe in the pool as opposed to the total submergence found here, as Kylesa surrender themselves to weirder songwriting tics, prismatic genre-blending, and spiritual concession.
From Noisey:
By now, the band really seems to have grown into itself, and Kylesa’s new album, Exhausting Fire (out 10/2 on Season of Mist) is the sum of all their myriad influences, from swampy sludge to icy goth, crystallized and refined into perfection. This is the album that finally sees Kylesa achieve their lofty potential; it’s the most focused and interesting release in their long discography, and may well signify a watershed moment in their career. They’ve never sounded better, or more ready to take things to the next level.
Exhausting Fire feels like an ethereal trip — sometimes you’re spinning drunkenly in the open air; sometimes you’re running ecstatically, crazily, under a blackened sky; sometimes you’re diffidently questioning the reality of everything around you; sometimes you just give yourself over to the driving beat.
Click here for details on the Savannah show, which includes openers Inter Arma, Indian Handcrafts, and Irata.