Review
Intronaut
Habitual Levitations (Instilling Words With Tones)

The mighty Intronaut is back! The band returns with their fourth full length, still following the same path they first set with the release of their monumental debut Void. You know when a record is great when you cannot really start pinpointing it in one specific genre, and this is the case here with Inronaut’s last album Habitual Levitations (Instilling Words With Tones). Although the influences from other bands are there, the way that Intronaut is implementing them to craft their own sound is truly unique, separating themselves from other modern metal bands.

The first thing that struck is that in this album, Intronaut seem to be much more comfortable with their sound, at first I thought that the album might have been lacking some punch but I understood soon enough that that was not the case here. Intronaut blends together post metal moments, sludgy guitars beautifully with jazzy music, and although that is something the have been doing since they first started. But I think that it is in Habitual Levitations that they have managed to merge them in such a way that they sound much more coherent and in place than they did before, so if you think that their music was great before, it is fucking brilliant now.

With their music being also influenced from some of the greatest bands of the previous years, from Tool (for example in the second part of “Steps” and the clean parts in “The Welding)" and Isis, the dreamy type of vocals brings to mind the work of the great post metal band, and then to the heavier moments of Neurosis, especially in the first part of “Steps” and to the early days of Mastodon (up to Remission) in songs like “Sore Sight for Eyes," Intronaut is taking all that information, adding to them their own tone and their great musicianship (seriously Danny Walker is one of the best modern drummers out there today), enriching it with their jazz influences which at points can even be compared to the way that Cynic were doing that in their debut album, Focus (minus the death metal obviously). 

So there it is: an excellent album with jazz influences, epic atmospheres in songs such “Harmonomicon," the beautiful “Blood From A Stone” and the perfect closing track of the album “The Way Down," and with one of the tightest performances (it is almost unreal) that you will get in a band. A band that deserves to be called progressive, and an album that you most definitely need to listen to.