King Woman – Created in the Image of Suffering (Review)

King Woman are a doom metal band from the US. This is their debut album.

Created in the Image of Suffering is an album that takes traditional doom metal and redefines it for the 2017 audience.

Adding female vocals to doom metal is something that’s a lot more common than it once was, so it’s great to hear a band like King Woman doing something different with this idea and firmly stamping their own identity on the scene.

The music on this album is rooted in doom metal, but the end result is so much more than this. Created in the Image of Suffering feels somewhat timeless too, as although there’s aspects of the old-school here, it’s also very much a product of the modern environment.

Heavy, sludgy riffs combine with shoegaze moments of transcendence to create songs that have definite atmospheric qualities quite at odds with the conservative song lengths of most of the material here. Even the longer tracks seem unusually focused and direct, despite their slightly longer duration.

There’s plenty of fuzzy guitars and walls of emotive distortion for the listener to sink their teeth into. The tracks seem to take on an almost fantastical aspect when you really get into them, almost as if they speak of lands, times and events that are not completely of this Earth.

The band’s singer breathes her ethereal and soulful vocals all over the music. Combined with the spacey quality of the songs she helps send this album into heady stratospheric heights that many have glimpsed, but few have travelled.

I like the band’s ability to write music that builds and develops an emotional narrative from the base up. Once it grabs you in this way, it doesn’t let go. Even though it’s not an excessively long album at just under 40 minutes in length, you still feel like you’ve been on a journey and you might even end up feeling a little changed by your experiences.

King Woman have crafted a doom album for the ages; only time will tell how much this statement is true and just how much is hyperbole, but this is a seriously strong release, regardless.