Glue yourself to your seat, tie yourself to a tree, put rocks in your shoes, or do something to prepare yourself to be blown away by the new SLIFT album. ILION is an explosive new odyssey crafted by the French trio, and it is everything you could ask of three musicians. The epic listening journey is bursting with innovative melodies and unpredictable song structure, never wasting a second of its over-an-hour-long runtime. ILION is the band’s first album since 2020, and it is worth every second of the wait. The psych-rock giants blur the lines between rock subgenres for an all-encompassing, full-body listening experience worth your undivided attention.
SLIFT’s latest album is aggressive, distorted, and face-melting yet, oddly enough, the band kept the sonic landscape warm and welcoming. Lined with medieval tropes and epic crescendos, this sounds like the album the band was always meant to make. SLIFT created an expansive sonic playground for their lofty ideas to frolic in freely, letting each concept unravel in epic rock moments of operatic proportions. From the second you press play, you won’t want to leave your seat. Like a well-done feature film, ILION fearlessly chugs along at its own pace. SLIFT is in complete control of your environment during their latest, the epic cosmos injected into each sonic twist and melodic turn makes these songs come to life and wander around like the poltergeist of a giant.
The album kicks off with the booming title track, an appropriate welcome to this chaotic journey. This album is not easy to digest and that is a good thing. It is a cinematic experience that requires multiple listens to truly understand the nuances of ILION. Ear-tingling screams and neck-breaking drum patterns drive the album forward while SLIFT structures these songs in an abstract collage style. Like an old wind-up toy, SLIFT powers down for moments of melodic bliss like the song “Uruk”. This track features one of the most shocking contrasts in tones these imaginative songs have to offer, a smooth drum pattern is greeted with subtle guitar strumming. Only for these transcendental instrumentals to implode on itself, leaving the door wide open for an avalanche of pure metal mayhem.
While the instrumentals shape ILION’s personality, SLIFT has grown tremendously in the lyrical department. The lyrics of this LP deal with mortality and the lack of an escape from it. Accepting your surroundings is a big step for anyone, the band is seemingly speaking from a God’s perspective without carrying the ego that would come along with it. The band’s lyrics read like old folk tales, stories of great artists and adventures unfurling in small pieces of poetry. Don’t let their screeching delivery mechanism fool you, SLIFT is delivering gorgeous stories over the control chaos of their arrangements. “The Words That Have Never Been Heard” is the lyrical stand-out from the LP, a hero’s journey about a reflective character trying to filter the horrors of the world through the innocence of art.
Combine the most daring theatrical performance with tropes from the Dark Ages and set them to tempos incomprehensible to the average man and you get SLIFT’s ILION.