Prog-keen death-metallers Black Crown Initiate have been assaulting speakers since 2012, releasing three full-length albums along the way: The Wreckage of Stars, Selves We Cannot Forgive and this year's Violent Portraits of Doomed Escape - which blends melody with brutality throughout its nine ambitious tracks.
Death Comes in Reverse features some of the most diverse songwriting to come out of the genre in recent memory, navigating slower, stripped-back sections and fuller arrangements.
Guitarists Ethan McKenna and Andy Thomas join Guitar World today to play through the track in full, and do so wielding mighty 8-string electric guitars: a Kiesel DC800 and an ESP E2 HRF NT-8 Baritone, respectively. Both guitars are running through EVH 5150 III 50W amps.
"Death Comes In Reverse is definitely a strange arrangement for us," Thomas says. "It has a lot of sparse, textural parts, and is really built off of one idea."
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Sam was Staff Writer at GuitarWorld.com from 2019 to 2023, and also created content for Total Guitar, Guitarist and Guitar Player. He has well over 15 years of guitar playing under his belt, as well as a degree in Music Technology (Mixing and Mastering). He's a metalhead through and through, but has a thorough appreciation for all genres of music. In his spare time, Sam creates point-of-view guitar lesson videos on YouTube under the name Sightline Guitar.
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