Slayer Is a Nostalgia Act. Lombardo Isn’t.
Lombardo’s post-Slayer run has been more interesting than Slayer’s last decade, and it isn’t close.
Dave Lombardo and Lustmord have formed a duo called Lustmord Lombardo. Their debut album The Pulse Of Atoms lands October 2 on Ipecac Recordings, and lead single “Paleomagnetic Resonance” is out today. Lustmord, for anyone who only knows the metal side of the room, is Brian Williams, the Welsh producer who essentially built dark ambient out of nothing and has been scoring the inside of your worst dreams since the late ’80s.
Lustmord’s pitch for the record is not subtle. “This is the sound of planets dying or of stars being born,” he says, adding that he wanted something you can’t place in any genre or any decade.
Here’s the thing. Lombardo walked away from Slayer in 2013. Since then he has played in Fantômas, Dead Cross, Mr. Bungle, the Misfits, Suicidal Tendencies, Testament, Empire State Bastard, and Venamoris. Slayer in that same window gave us one album in 2015, a farewell tour, and then an un-farewell tour playing that same setlist to festival fields. One of those is a career. The other is a victory lap with a merch table.
And this isn’t a metal drummer dabbling in ambient to seem deep. Ipecac is Mike Patton’s label and Lombardo has been orbiting Patton for twenty-five years, so the pairing has real history behind it. What makes it worth your time is the constraint: dark ambient is hostile to drummers by design. There’s no riff to lock into, no tempo to drive, nothing to hit hard. Lombardo has spent forty years being the loudest thing in the room. Watching him play into space instead of against it is the most genuinely unpredictable thing happening in his catalog right now.
The Pulse Of Atoms is available to pre-order now.
Slayer will continue to schedule reunion shows to play the hits. Lombardo will be somewhere else, doing something nobody asked for. That’s been the pattern for a decade, and it keeps being the better bet.
Source: Ipecac Recordings