This summer, the great Richmond underground metal extremists Inter Arma will head out on tour with Pallbearer. Before that, they’ll release their album New Heaven, which promises to be a punishing beast of a record. It’s Inter Arma’s first album of new material since 2019’s colossal Sulphur English, though Inter Arma also released the pretty-great covers collection Garbers Days Revisited in 2020. In making New Heaven, Inter Arma somehow went through four different bassists before landing on new member Joel Moore. We’ve already posted the intense, serrated seven-and-a-half-minute New Heaven title track, and now they’ve dropped another one.

Inter Arma’s new track “Concrete Cliffs” is slower and doomier than “New Heaven,” but it comes suffused with the same apocalyptic darkness. The riffs crunch hard, the atmospheric effects moan and howl like angry wind, and singer Mike Paparo growls like an ancient god who’s been awakened from his slumber. Here’s what drummer and bandleader TJ Childers says about the song:

While sonically “Concrete Cliffs” doesn’t exactly traverse any new terrain in the Inter Arma universe — psychedelia, one-note knuckle-dragger riffs, and Lizzy-esque harmony guitars — it marks the first time we’ve ever gone after a harsh verse/melodic chorus dichotomy within a song. It’s kind of a classic metal recipe that we put our own fucked up spin on. Hope ya’ll dig it.

That is a very unpretentious way to describe an overwhelming song! Watch the Brendan McGowan-directed “Concrete Cliffs video below.

New Heaven is out 4/26 on Relapse.