“Short Life”

It’s been a little over a year since the Brooklyn-based experimental metal trio Sannhet set a new, sublime standard for instrumental frisson with their excellent sophomore album, Revisionist. The band's leaden bricolage resembles a roaring, inescapable wind tunnel, inspired by some of rock’s most dynamic subgenres, including black metal, ambient drone, space rock, sludge, and post-hardcore. Their multifaceted sound can be summed up rather succinctly as “intense,” and that definitely suits “Short Life,” Sannhet’s first new music since the Revisionist sessions.

Released as part of Adult Swim’s annual Singles series, the four-minute track bears a fresh coat of corpse paint, teeming with pulverizing blast beats and tremolo guitars that wail like professional mourners. The trio haven’t altered their framing devices since we heard them last, swathing the sounds of Norway ‘95 in a thick blanket of feedback that simultaneously comforts and overwhelms: a strategy pioneered by Neurosis, Pelican, and others. Nevertheless, Sannhet's brows seem all the more furrowed on “Short Life,” their riffs and polyrhythms all the more urgent—a tense display reflecting the do-or-die mentality inherent in the song’s title, not to mention the band’s career at large.