Captivating heavy rock visionaries Auralayer announced the release of their raucous debut album, Thousand Petals, which will arrive on July 14 via King Volume Records. The bombastic power trio out of Greenville, SC deliver a unique blend of powerful doom riffs, kinetic progressive rock drums, and electrifying pop-inspired melodies throughout Thousand Petals, making the album impressively heavy and undeniably catchy.
New Noise are excited to premiere the official Scott Rudd visualizer/lyric video for Auralayer’s second single, “Christ Antler,” which utilizes the album’s cover art provided by Juan Montoya (Torche). On their first single, “All My Time,” Auralayer displayed their ability to produce psychedelic riffage with high levels of energy, but with “Christ Antler,” the band shift towards the use of alluring melodies to compliment the overall pensive nature of the track.
Guitarist Thomas Powell attributes the band’s diverse sound to their eclectic tastes in music, stating: “I’m really into doom, especially bands like High on Fire. Vladimir, our drummer, is really into progressive rock, and his favorite drummer is Neil Peart. And Jake, our bassist, really likes pop music—The Beatles and Talking Heads.”
Thanks to those disparate influences, the band are largely unencumbered by typical doom and stoner rock clichés during the writing phase—a fact that has helped them develop their own original metal sound. To help them harness their energetic musical vision, the band recruited Philip Cope, the founder of the experimental metal band Kylesa, to engineer, mix, and master their debut at Jam Room Recording Studio in Columbia, SC.
As with Kylesa, Cope helped to capture and channel the band’s diverse influences and experimentation into a cohesive sonic palette—on both the debut album and the band’s 2021 Solar Plexus EP. Despite the band’s collective encyclopedic knowledge of music, the trio has also pulled inspiration from a variety of artistic and philosophical sources, while still maintaining a unified final product. The new album title, for example, comes from the Sahasrara padma, the crown chakra that translates to “the lotus of a thousand petals” and is symbolic of supreme consciousness and enlightenment.
Thousand Petals Tracklist:
1. The Lake
2. All My Time
3. Christ Antler
4. Faith To Reason
5. Shelf Black
6. Peacemonger
7. You Walk
8. Dance To Thrash
9. Monstrum
Auralayer is Thomas Powell (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, FX/pedals), Jake “Kimble” Williams (vocals, bass, miscellaneous percussion), and Vladimir Doodle (drums, percussion, backup vocals). Thousand Petals was recorded, mixed, and engineered by Philip Cope (Jam Room Recording Studio, Columbia, SC). The album’s cover art was provided by Juan Montoya (Torche) with drawing by Todd Ryan White, color and design by Chris Allison, and album formatting by Wes Brooks.
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Watch the visualizer/lyric video for “Christ Antler” by Auralayer here:
Preorder Thousand Petals from King Volume Records here, and follow Auralayer here.
Photo courtesy of Chloe Dalton
