Track Premiere: Rot Coven – ‘Inverted Chasm’

Have you ever wished Earth, Primitive Man, Portal and Swans had a very ugly baby? I hope so, because that’s what you get in Rot Coven, a duo pushing death industrial to an extreme end. Formed in 2020, Rot Coven initially had plans to fuse dark ambient synths with doom-style drumming; that plan quickly went out the window and instead became what you hear on this preview of the 20-minute track “Inverted Chasm.”

Pulled from the band’s debut album, Nightmares Devour the Waking World, “Inverted Chasm” takes slow, plodding death-sludge and obfuscates it in a swirl of synthscapes and rumbling noise. The song unravels slowly—the eight minutes and 53 seconds previewed here are less than half of the song’s 20-minute length—and tests the listener’s patience,  invoking feelings of dystopia and death rather than following a typical structure. These feelings are heightened by the grainy black-and-white music video that accompanies the sample.

Speaking about “Inverted Chasm,” Rot Coven told Decibel:

“I think the first time we jammed the riff that would eventually turn into ‘Inverted Chasm’ we had this vague idea it would be a real simple, three minutes/ one riff dirge thing that would just kick in, pound the listener to dust, then get out before it went on too long.

“Imagine our surprise when, six months later, the track is clocking in at nearly twenty minutes long, and every time we run it we wind up adding a new section or another layer of noise.

“Always under construction, never quite complete.

“Tear down, restart, continue.

“We honestly talked about cutting our losses and scrapping the track a couple different times because it was starting to feel like the Winchester Mystery House, but then one day everything kind of snapped into focus and we felt like it was finally done.

“Looking at everything that went into putting this one together I can say it was a ton of work, and at certain points it was a massive pain in the ass (especially when it was looking like we were gonna completely blow a deadline with nothing to show for it), but in the end I’m glad we didn’t scrap it ‘cos it wound up being one of our coolest tracks.

“Funny thing though? I don’t think the riff that started the whole process actually made it into the final track.”

Nightmares Devour the Waking World is out on August 15 via Aesthetic Death.