Dark and bleak, but not overpowering like Black Metal or Avant-Garde. Our Fall objective shall be to use the hashtag #DoomGaze more often!

Greek trio Church Of The Sea are one of those bands that life tosses at you and you fall in love with. Just like that. For us as Too Much Love, “Sweet Surprise” was definitely a winning combination of the vocals (reminiscent a little bit to Chelsea Wolfe, but with a higher pitch), and the repetitive, shoegazy, heavy sound of the music behind said vocals.

And let’s talk about that music! Electronic bass lines, so fuzzy you’re not sure it’s a machine playing dirty or a human playing it filthy. Clean guitars at the beginning, followed by overdriven ones, playing melancholic notes. Metallic clangs and other sound give the track an ominous sound. And then there’s the fact that while the track starts off in a classic way, the music becomes almost like a hypnotic loop towards the ends. Trust me when I say it is easy to loose track of reality while listening to “Sweet Surprise”.

Church Of The Sea were formed in 2017 in Athens, Greece, when three individuals came together to create a distinct sound, balancing between doom and dark electronic rock. They embrace fuzzed sounds, heavy distorted beats and ethereal, chant‐like vocals. The result is a unique atmosphere where doom’s heaviness meets the dreamlike state of shoegaze and the shrieks of noise‐rock.

“Sweet Surprise” was engineered and produced by Alex Bolpasis and Church of the Sea, and mixed and mastered by Chris Common (Chelsea Wolfe, Omar Rodriguez Lopez, Emma Ruth Rundle).

Let’s check out what “Sweet Surprise” is all about!