Some bands have real good craftmanship. Some bands know very well how to write good songs. Some bands can simply convince with their live performance. Chaosbay belong to the few bands where all this is on absolute top level.
The alternative metal band from Berlin and Kaiserlautern has developed more and more into the direction of progressive-metalcore over the last couple of years. In this mixture, both of the band’s great strengths come to the fore: Musical perfection meets a creative flair for compelling melodies that also fall on open ears outside the faction of progressive metal fans. Comparisons like Periphery, Tesseract, but also Opeth, Porcupine Tree and Dream Theater fall again and again in connection with the band’s sound.
It is impressive with which somnambulistic certainty Chaosbay let epic melodies blossom within progressive structures and thus create a light-footed comprehensibility, in which one finds one’s way despite all complexity just as quickly as in a pop song.
Chaosbay consist of four music professionals around the age of 30, each of whom has already been booked as an accompanist for well-known artists for individual tours or performances. After a turbulent initial phase, there was a three-year break from the stage starting in 2015 to push ahead with personal projects. After a line-up change in 2018, the band has been back in full juice and is now on the verge of leaving its status as an insider tip behind.
After three EPs and an initially digital-only debut album, the band released their concept album “Asylum” in 2020 to consistently positive reviews in the press. Less than a year later, Chaosbay now return with new material. And it has it all.
The new single “Lonely People” is the first part of the EP “Boxes” planned for fall 2021 and at the same time the beginning of the collaboration with the newly founded label Circular Wave, which is on a mission to bring modern rock music with quality standards to an international audience, whose younger shares have just begun the rediscovery of guitar music and are hungry for new alternatives to the monotony of lean back playlists with the lowest common denominator. Produced by singer Jan Listing, the song is in no way inferior to the international competition. Patrick Bernath‘s drumming stands out powerfully, while singer Jan brings an enormous range of dynamics and emotions to his vocal performance, which hovers like a beacon above the well-sorted storm of instruments.
The songs on the EP are both once catchier and heavier than before. The five tracks form an overall concept that deals with the darker side of life in the digital space. The lyrics paint a dystopian picture: Trapped in a digital world with only themselves, humans are overwhelmed and shackled by the monsters they create. Social media and smartphones have become all the more pronounced from a help to an uninvited control over one’s life as one gets sucked into the digital void.
“I’ve got this feeling the machines have won.”
The ghosts I called… Today’s man as a modern version of Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice. “Lonely People” is the name of the opening single to the upcoming EP “Boxes”, and “Lonely People” – that’s all of us who have to face the challenges of the digital worlds of help and substitutes in one way or another.
