Northern Irish death/doom metal trio The Crawling have issued their new EP, What We Leave Behind, through Grindscene Records on CD, cassette, and digital formats. The outfit are also set to return to the stage, with a string of shows due to get underway soon (see dates below).

The EP first offers up "A Song To Nurse The Sickness" - formidable in its heaviness and implacable in purpose. The Crawling demonstrate their sonic integrity, unafraid to reveal the spaces between the notes, as the vocals are delivered with harsh clarity and the guitars weave sombre, melancholy melodies. It forces us to confront the choking caul of the past, the destructive nature of those consuming, drowning thoughts where reflection becomes immersion and remembrance becomes addiction. The clinging weight of each note and the terrifying bleakness of every word are made all the more powerful and poignant by the uncluttered, unembellished presentation. This is not artifice; this is truth.

Completing the EP and closing a chapter in The Crawling's story is "Bound To The Negative (Requiem)", a remarkable acoustic rebirth of one of the band's finest songs, originally appearing in a fiercer form on All Of This For Nothing. The song's strength is illustrated by its ability to assume this new mantle while retaining its emotional heft and bleak splendour. This is a genuine act of transformation, with the band reaching into the grim nobility of the original, drawing out its glimmering threads of melody and reweaving them anew to capture an aura of medieval balladry. Its sound and perspective have been reshaped, but the conclusion remains unchanged, mirroring the way memory repeatedly revises the past without fundamentally altering what actually happened.

Guitarist and vocalist Andy Clarke noted: "The EP is an acknowledgement that the past is behind us. We spend too long lamenting what has been, rather than being mindful of the present and the joy it can bring. Then, when we finally realise time has slipped away, we begin mourning that as well. The constant mourning of time is a sickness."

With the resonance of the drums captured at The Parlour Recording Studios (The Haunted, At The Gates, Napalm Death, among others) and all other aspects of the recording, mixing and mastering kept in-house, the sound of What We Leave Behind is unmistakably The Crawling. Every element of the songs is there in plain sight; no dissembling sonic wizardry, just open, honest power and passion. What We Leave Behind could not be any other way.

Complemented by the evocative artwork of Redamaut (Perpetual Paradox, Mother Crone, Altar Of Moss, among others), What We Leave Behind stands as another essential tale in the unfolding chronicles of The Crawling. The EP lays bare our troubling obsession with the places, people, events and emotions of the past, examining the ways in which we strive to live within unreliable recollections of times gone by, elevating loves and losses, joys and heartaches above the present while undermining our hope of a meaningful future. This is What We Leave Behind... Link