Track

The Silence Beyond Life

Artist

Fuming Mouth

Fuming Mouth backstory

Emerging from Massachusetts in 2013, Fuming Mouth’s name rapidly spread through the US underground. Their sound was rooted in Swedish death metal (especially its Stockholm variant), but carried a potent strain of HC.

Indeed, Fuming Mouth helped to lay the foundations for the current explosion of USDM and brought many hardcore kids into the post-noughties DM scene.

By 2021’s debut album, The Grand Descent, they were on the international map.

Tragically, later in 2021, vocalist/guitarist Mark Whelan was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia, and he spent nearly a year battling cancer through chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.

Thankfully, Whelan emerged cancer-free from his harrowing journey – and Fuming Mouth’s new era began, with a little help from producer Kurt Ballou of Converge fame.

Recording of Fuming Mouth’s second album – Last Day of Sun – started in October 2022 at Balou’s God City studio in Salem, and The Silence Beyond Life is the first single to be taken from the record.

“What started as a fictional concept album became incredibly real,” says Whelan of the new opus. “I was facing certain death, but as I kept writing the album its theme became clear. You could die tomorrow. Seize the day.”

In vocalist/guitarist Mark Whelan’s own words

The Silence Beyond Life is our most melodic and heaviest song to date drawing influence from God Macabre, Gorement, and other melodic Swedish death metal acts of the time like Therion and Cemetary.

“It’s a song about trying to live while longing to die and overcoming that.”

The verdict on The Silence Beyond Life

We might not have been expecting the huge melodic chorus that Whelan serves up on The Silence Beyond Life, but it adds some serious emotional clout to a song that reaches into the soul.

However, anyone worried that Fuming Mouth have abandoned their core sound needn’t be concerned. That HM-2 soaked guitar tone, those loving nods to Sweden’s death metal heyday, the gravity well riffs, they’re all there… it’s just that this time they’re wrapped in an even darker shroud.

Kurt Ballou has done a fine job of helping the band enter their next chapter, giving this track the weight it needs to bridge the gap between The Grand Descent and Fuming Mouth ’23.

And Whelan sounds like he’s putting every fibre of his being into this.

What’s next for Fuming Mouth?

Last Day of Sun is set for a November 3 release on Nuclear Blast.

Enjoyed this? Check out last week’s Red Hot Track of the Week from Finnish death metal crew Disguised Malignance here.