Everest Queen – Everest Queen (Review)

This is the debut EP from Everest Queen, a sludge metal band from the UK.

The first song, Ascent, sets out Everest Queen’s love of heaviness in no uncertain terms. At just over a minute in length it’s just an intro track, a warm up for the two main events to come.

Across Curse of the Everest Queen and Catacombs the band show what they’re capable of with ease. This is heavy doom/sludge metal with some stoner metal influences too.

In addition to this, and quite interestingly, there’s also some progressive metal elements to parts of the songs, showing that there’s more to Everest Queen than mere devotees of the Eyehategod school of feedback and heaviness.

I like these additional influences that the band have as it makes their output more interesting. Both of these songs are well-written and strike the right balance between simple heaviness and more nuanced depth. The latter of the two conditions showing up as a confidence to take the distortion down a notch on occasion and play for mood and atmosphere instead.

So yes, Everest Queen manage to successfully achieve both moody introspection and extroverted rocking-the-Hell-out on this short EP. This is one of the many reasons that I enjoyed it so much and I predict good things coming from them in the future.

Ones to watch.