If you’ve got similar music taste to me — which you hopefully know by now by reading some of my posts — then you should be incredibly stoked that Aerial is making a comeback (quick sidenote, I have also decided to make a comeback and start posting articles again, even if there’s no one here reading them). If you’re not familiar with this beautiful, majestic, Norwegian 4-man band, then let me get you up to speed.
Aerial started out back in 2015, with just a single and a dream to be fucking sick. Which they accomplished. That single was called ‘Realizations’ and it put them on the map of sweet, ambient, melodic metalcore bands. I have to admit, I didn’t find them until they released their debut EP, Foresight, in 2016. I discovered them because at the time I was really into bands that had a similar sound to Erra‘s first album Impulse and Invent Animate‘s first (allegedly)* album Everchanger. More recently I actually found out that the same guy recorded all three of these and more stuff that I love dearly. Yeah, that guy’s name is Brian Hood, and he’s a music-producing god. For real, everything he touches is gold.
Anyway, when I recently found out about Brian and the rest of the music he’s worked on, I was going through his portfolio and was reminded of Aerial and their awesome EP. So I opened up Spotify to add it to my Melodic playlist, and there was this weird thing that stood out to me… In their artist profile section, it said something like: “BIG THINGS COMING OCTOBER 8TH” or something like that, I don’t remember. As far as I knew, Aerial had broken up after their EP in 2016, and it was now 2023, so I figured this was just left over from back when they were active. So I was really surprised when October 8th came around and they dropped a new single. now you’re thinking, “wait hold on, the title of this article says two new singles.” And you’re exactly right, because I took so long to write this article that they went and released another one.
The first of these two singles is called ‘Roots,’ and feels like a true return to form for the band. Soaring clean vocals and brutal screams over top of some great guitar melodies. The chorus is super catchy: “When my mind can’t find the patterns, and my mouth refuses to move” gets stuck in my head all day after listening to it. I like the second single, ‘Silent,’ even more than the first. It captures a lot of great things that I’ve been looking for in metalcore recently: Cool, ambient layered guitar and heavier sections that come out of nowhere, but don’t feel forced (like a lot of metalcore does these days). Let’s just say Aerial is cut from a different cloth than the mainstream bands that have been putting out music lately.
Normally I talk about the members of a band that I’m writing about, but I must admit I don’t know much about Aerial’s members, and their recent return to writing music may have seen a member change or two. As far as I know, the original four members of Aerial were Markus Johnsen on vocals, Mathias Corneliussen on drums, Josef Fredén on bass, and Andreas Stensland on guitar. According to various internet sources, they were childhood friends who grew up together and made the band, then decided to move to the UK. Sometime after Foresight was released, they ended up returning to Norway. The only other outstanding thing that I know about the members is that they recently posted a guitar playthrough of Roots on youtube, and the guitarist in that video is Vebjørn Iversen, who you can watch in said video below. So it looks like either they added a 5th member to the band, or someone was replaced. Either way, The new singles sound great and pretty similar to their older material.
Anyway, if you liked Aerial already I hope you’re as happy as I am with the new singles. If you didn’t, I hope I was able to introduce you to a sick band to you today. Here’s a link to their website with new music videos and other stuff! For fans of Invent Animate, Erra, Above Below, and Surroundings. Leave a comment below if you really like Aerial or if you have a band in mind that is pretty similar!
*Earlier I hinted that Everchanger is not Invent Animate’s first album, because they actually have a first album/EP called Waves. Admittedly it’s pretty rough, from when they hadn’t figured out their initial sound yet, but the song Lightfinder is on there, which they do still publicly claim as their song on Spotify.
