lowheaven

Over the last decade, Chicago quartet REZN have carved out a unique place in the landscape of heavy music, chiseling away at the crude formations of the topography, mining the most concentrated metallic ore from the dirt, and shaping it all into something monumental, imposing, and divine. While REZN has always fused seismic riffs with effortless beauty and grandeur, their shifting strategies for wielding that polarity have involved varied compositional and stylistic decisions, most notably the light-and-dark contrast of companion albums Solace (2023) and Burden (2024). But with their newest full-length offering, Cycles in the Infinite Dream, REZN masterfully harness the oppressive weight of their full sonic armory to celestial melodies and sublime synesthesia-inducing atmospherics in a manner so seamless it feels otherworldly, as if occupying a liminal space between two realities.

Formed in the spring of 2020, beneath the dark clouds of the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders, lowheaven’s sound oscillates somewhere between post-hardcore, screamo, blackened noise, and metal. Vocalist and guitarist Dan Thomson, formerly of Canadian post-hardcore band Sparrows, explains candidly, “We’re not a happy listen, lowheaven is something that has got a lot of weight.” Their debut album, Ritual Decay, explores the reality of complete social isolation and the acceptance of what it means to lose faith in life and yourself.