Intronaut balance metal with melody on new Valley of Smoke
The album art for Intronaut's new album, Valley of Smoke, is some of the best the metal genre has seen all year. It shows a winged skeleton overlooking a hazy valley landscape, while a vibrantly colored lizard loiters nearby. The image is psilocybinic and prehistoric, like a glimpse into someone's twisted subconscious. It encapsulates Intronaut's elusive nature in a single image. Whereas skeletons are a stock caricature of metal lore, the lizard is not. This proves that Intronaut is not your typical metal band. Possessing metal, sludge and jazz-fusion skills, Intronaut have carved their own loner niche in the metal genre alongside other fringe acts like Isis or Cave-In. Over their short yet lustrous career, Intronaut have honed in on this conglomeration of styles in an evolutionary process (sans any growing pains) and garnered critical acclaim without any accusations of an identity crisis.