News: JIRM: The Obelisk Debuts "Candle Eyes" Video From Stockholm Heavy Rockers; Surge Ex Monumentis Full-Length To See Release Via Small Stone

Surge Ex Monumentis, the impending new full-length from Swedish heavy rockers faction JIRM, formerly Jeremy Irons And The Ratgang Malibus, will drop via Small Stone this March. In advance of its release, The Obelisk is pleased to unveil the official video for album opener, "Candle Eyes."

 

Writes The Obelisk, "With an underpinning of space metal, heavy progressive swirl and a flourish of psychedelic reaching, the six-minute 'Candle Eyes' begins Surge Ex Monumentis with a feel that's both classic and vital... JIRM have their own agenda and their blend when it comes to bringing together heavy rock and prog, and by injecting a current of '80s-style metal grandiosity - notice I didn't say 'glam-diosity;' that's not what we're talking about here - they find a niche for themselves and begin to dig into what will likely be a continuing process of forward creative growth."

 

Adds the band of the track, "A man climbs the tree of life, the tree which is connecting the earth with the stars, the tree which connect you with everything.... Only to witness that this life is not for the humankind, so he crawls back down again... True story...Ain't it?"

 

View "Candle Eyes," courtesy of The Obelisk, at THIS LOCATION.

 

Surge Ex Monumentis will see release on CD, digital, and limited edition 2xLP formats via Small Stone on March 16th. Preorders are currently available at THIS LOCATION.

 

Sometimes in life you have to make a change. And sometimes you have to make a whole bunch of changes. So it is that JIRM is born and stands where once stood Jeremy Irons And The Ratgang Malibus. Having dropped the cumbersome moniker, the Swedish heavy rockers embark on a new era with Surge Ex Monumentis - marked as much by a tightening of sound as name.

 

For their first record as JIRM, the Stockholm-based four-piece of vocalist/guitarist Karl Apelmo, guitarist Micke Pettersson, bassist Viktor Källgren, and drummer Henke Persson cast off the shackles of expectation entirely. Their style is no less expansive, but it's become entirely their own, a driving mind meld between psychedelia, classic metal, heavy rock, and individualized realms beyond. Surge Ex Monumentis brims with newfound energy at the same time it benefits from the lessons JIRM have learned since first getting together in 2004 and releasing albums like Elefanta(2009), Bloom (2011), and Spirit Knife (2014), a record Mass Movement crowned, "a blissful mixture of Soundgarden at their grooviest and Pink Floyd...a terrific album of sunny day, top down, cruising music."

 

With as much progressive force as raw sweat behind them, JIRM has never been more themselves than they are on Surge Ex Monumentis, and even as they redefine who they are and what they do as a band, they remain singularly powerful in their delivery and completely unmistakable. The seven-track offering was captured at Puch Studios in Stockholm, Sweden, mixed by Oskar Lindberg at Svenska Grammofonstudion in Gothenburg, Sweden and mastered by Chris Gooseman at Baseline Audio Labs in Ann Arbor, Michigan.