Deeply Armed - Black Ice Deeply Armed

Following the release of their acclaimed debut, The Healing, Belfast's Deeply Armed return with their new single Black Ice, featuring exclusive remixes by dub legend Mad Professor and Andrew Fearn of Sleaford Mods.

All tracks were mastered by Keith Tenniswood (Radioactive Man/ 2 Lone Swordsmen).
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Belfast’s Deeply Armed return with a monster of a new single, “Black Ice”, which marries the post-Kraut swagger of prime-era Mondays with an XTRMNTR sense of punked-up malevolence. If their debut release “The Healing” presented the band at their most benevolent and euphorically optimistic, “Black Ice” is very much its flip; a bass-heavy soundtrack to truth, trust and resurgence led by a hypnotic thousand-yard-stare of a vocal from Michael McKeown. Generating a sense of claustrophobic euphoria that is somehow simultaneously elating and oppressive, guest vocalist Marion Jordan takes the track to the next level, with her soulful, haunting backing vocal, while the rhythm section plays it deep, looping dub-inflected bass lines that give the nod to Wobble-era PiL while generating a rhythm that rolls and chugs amid a fug of F/X.

As per their established operating strategy, the group have offered the track out to fellow travellers, this time around commissioning Andrew Fearn of Sleaford Mods under his solo guise of Extnddntwrk and dub legend Mad Professor to reconstitute it across two thrilling remixes that, between them, plot the poles of their influences.

Fearn homes in on the vocals, twisting them around some experimental modular synth that walks the line between DIY hypnotics and Messthetics-scale crunk. Here “Black Ice” returns as a clatter of trance, with electronics laid out on a surging Möbius strip while the vocals haunt the dancehall.

Mad Professor – a central totemic influence on the band - cuts an intense live mix of the track that marries dub science with psychedelic alchemy, playing to the black heart of the group’s heavy dub leanings while highlighting the cracked atmosphere of delirium and dislocation that propels the original.

This new 12” somehow tracks the arc of the band’s vision perfectly. Positioned somewhere between dance, dub and destructo-punk, they remain infected by some of the most irrepressible covert strains of underground music while offering up their jams as raw material for new visions of now. Watch out though: “Black Ice” is treacherous.

Words: David Keenan