Alpha Male Tea Party doesn’t always feature vocals, but when they do, they often make us wonder where the band would be if they fully committed to the bit. Whereas so many modern prog rock bands have hyper-competitive vocals, AMTP’s always fit perfectly because they don’t seem to take them as seriously. They just feel natural, never redirecting focus from the reliably humongous instrumental underneath, with the most shining example of this being the closing track of 2020’s Infinity Stare.
Last year, there was a slight buzz about AMTP as photos of the band hanging out began to surface, and eventually there was some confirmed studio presence, but considering Tom Peters is in the band, this can be a grey area in terms of him always being in the studio, producing bands like Iran Iran,, Bi-Curious, Empire State Bastard and more.
But anyway – we’re not trying to paparazzi here. What we’re trying to get at is that Alpha Male Tea Party finally dropped their first new music since 2020, and it’s the real deal. Get a load of “Battle Crab” below:
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One amazing development we seem to be picking up on is there seems to be a sheen of nu-metal over the established AMTP chunkiness. For the first time in a while, we were reminiscing on the days of Ra, Taproot, Mad at Gravity and Earshot. So in many ways the stuff that bridged nu-metal to post-grunge, a genre that really deserves a deep dive at some point here on FB, but we’ve yet to find the time. And hopefully, someone, somewhere tries to google Battle Toads, but happens upon this instead.
That being said, it actually makes sense for the band to splice the nu-metal sound into their repertoire, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’re just mixing it in at a higher proportion – when you think about it, and we talked about this recently in our YouTube interview with Greg from Car Bomb, there’s an aspect of the nu-metal craze that’s always been present with AMTP: incomprehensibly huge guitars.
Those are certainly here, but there’s also so much more. “Battle Crab” sounds like it was written as is, with the vocals in mind and instrumental breaks planned for. Again we’ve loved their vocal moments, but they’ve always felt like parallel additions. This feels like chemistry, like alchemy, and if this is a preview of what’s to come from AMTP in the future, we’ll be line till then.
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