Hailing from Barry in South Wales, The one man force of The7thGatekeeper has a name fit for such a formidable one man force and ‘The Hoard’ is a truly immersive and unsettling experience. It isn’t just a hard rock song, this is a tightly constructed, darkly atmospheric journey that just won’t let you go, this is an artist writing and creating with intense vision and complete creative control.
“The Hoard” erupts like the eye of a storm giving way to chaos, from the relaxed calm of its beginning. But from there it’s a relentless onslaught, shadowed, twisted guitar riffs carve through the mix with rhythmic ferocity, clearly not far from the intensity of Lamb of God and the socio political fire of Rage Against The Machine. The7thGatekeeper’s performance as vocals sits atop this maelstrom, a voice of commanding, sinister presence that drips with primal menace. There’s no waving white flags here, just rawness; boldness; honesty that feels more a visceral snarl than theatrical posturing; the defiant spirit of artists like Corey Taylor.
The amazing dynamic mastery of the song makes it powerful. It creates tension unrelentingly, affording only sporadic, gasping periods of relief before beating that tension back into furious charges. The listener is then transported across a truly surreal bridge: Guitars disappear and are replaced with ghostly, siren-like harmonies all under this eerie, floating atmosphere that feels like slipping through a crack in reality. This ethereal and unsettling passage is one of the most remarkable that The7thGatekeeper has built in world and the track as a whole feels incredibly deep as a result.
At the end there is nothing short of a thunderous climax. The energy regains explosively before reaching a final cut elevated by haunting, Gregorian style backing vocals. This doesn’t sound like it fades out; it sounds like a spell is being closed and closed and closed and can never be undone, with a deep and chilling resonance at the end.
Drawing from classic hard rock foundations, The7thGatekeeper steadily rams a right foot into darker and more imaginative territory. Sonically it channels the palpable frustration and despair in response to societal imbalance and misdirection and gives a potent, relevant core to the sonic fury.
It’s intense, it’s unique and it’s undeniably powerful. The7thGatekeeper’s a formidable statement of a man able to carve out his own lane within heavy music and intertwine his raw aggression with sophisticated atmospherics and unforgiving social consciousness. This is the sound of an artist who’s determined to make his presence felt.
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