Nature counts the black widow spider amongst its most fascinating and dangerous anomalies. The female arachnid often devours its mate after copulation. It's both a delicate and dangerous predator. In This Moment isn't all that different from this enigmatic beast. Led by frontwoman Maria Brink, the Los Angeles hard rock outfit strikes with a seductive metallic bite on their aptly titled fifth full-length album, Black Widow.

"Black Widow is a metaphor for this innocent young girl who gets infected with life, traumas, experiences, and the balance of light and darkness," explains Maria. "She becomes this poised and powerful creature. That's the album."

"We went into this with the title Black Widow," says lead guitarist Chris Howorth. "It fits the image of Maria as this powerful heroine. If you think of the boys in the audience watching our stage show, she's like the black widow pulling them all in."

The record, the first for the band on Atlantic Records, picks up where the group's 2012 breakthrough, Blood, left off. That album saw In This Moment debut at #15 on the Billboard Top 200, their highest chart position to date, and eventually sold over 250,000 units in the U.S. alone. It also spawned the single "Blood," which rose to #9 on the Mainstream Rock and Active Rock Songs charts. A sold out headline tour, HELLPOP, followed, as well as appearances at the Uproar Festival and Rock On The Range, and jaunts with Shinedown and Papa Roach. After the whirlwind of Blood subsided, Maria and Chris retreated to Las Vegas in February 2014 to begin working on what would become Black Widow with longtime producer Kevin Churko [Ozzy Osbourne, Five Finger Death Punch].

Melanie Martinez's creative drive and talents have always distinguished her from other musicians. After releasing her platinum-certified 2015 debut album, Cry Baby—which reached No. 1 on Billboard's alternative albums chart and has amassed over two billion streams worldwide —she conceived and directed a video for each song on the album. These mini-movies traced the traumas and insecurities experienced by the album's character, Cry Baby.
 
Melanie’s sophomore album and film, K-12, is another ambitious triumph. K-12's music is a vibrant and singular melting pot of low-key hip-hop, soulful pop and indie-leaning electro. K-12's universe is an expansion of the one introduced in Cry Baby. Using lyrics rich with metaphor, songs address the struggle to find a place to belong—including within friendships, the physical world and romantically—even when fitting into society feels like an uphill battle.
 
To accompany the album, Martinez wrote and directed a 90-minute movie (also called K-12) that incorporates the album's music and mirrors the themes and characters introduced. Filmed on location in Budapest, Hungary, the movie focuses on Cry Baby (portrayed by Martinez) and a class of students who find themselves trapped in a horror house-like residential school. As they experience the usual grade school rites of passage—a lunch room food fight, the embarrassment of gym class, a romance with nefarious intentions, courses taught by checked-out teachers— they have to figure out a way to escape.

MY NAME IS $NOT

mgmt: jake@markow.inc
booking: jrittenhouse@independentartistgroup.com

User 387357240 is following