The Incident at Black Lake

Released September 30, 2022, The Incident at Black Lake finds Edmonton metalcore veterans All Else Fails pushing into darker, heavier, and more personal territory. Built over a two-year period and self-produced by the band, the four-song EP combines punishing metalcore force with symphonic textures, industrial atmosphere, progressive turns, and moments of melodic release.

The record opens with the cinematic build of ‘I, Defiler’ before moving into the sprawling ‘Devour the Sun’, an eight-minute centrepiece driven by sharp riffing, dense arrangements, and Barrett Klesko’s shifting vocal attack. ‘Flesh /Excess /Wealth’ adds further complexity, balancing rhythmic aggression with layered guitar work, while the closing ‘Crystal Mountain’ brings the EP to a forceful finish with one of its most direct and urgent performances.

Lyrically and emotionally, The Incident at Black Lake is among the band’s most exposed releases, shaped by themes of inner turmoil, existential collapse, and survival through darkness. Rather than softening that weight, All Else Fails build it into the sound itself, creating a record that is severe, atmospheric, and carefully constructed. At only four tracks, the EP is compact, but its scope feels much larger, standing as one of the band’s most intense and fully realized statements.

-Robert Williston

  This album is fucking dark, musically and lyrically. I wrote my parts in the darkest, most distressed headspace I have ever been in. Most of the time during the writing of this album, I was convinced that I had been unglued from time, I was barely functioning. Through the fog and sensation of reality warping around me, I somehow found clarity in my writing. Weirdly, at first, I didn’t know that I was writing about myself, I was just kind of writing. I remember there was a day when we got our first mix back, and I hadn’t heard the songs in a few weeks, 30 seconds into the first verse, I collapsed in this park I was walking in, I realized that the songs were me, describing the suffering I had been experiencing so that I could understand what was happening in my own head, it was completely overwhelming. I had created something so direct, with zero awareness that I was doing so. It was a mind-bending experience, as if a past version of myself had reached out through time to help me understand what was happening to me, an absolute headfuck. For my contributions musically I created tones and sounds that conveyed how distorted the world around me felt, I was attempting to use the music to level out the turmoil I was experiencing internally. I was experiencing reality in waves of vertigo, time-loss and visual blackouts, I was trying to push back on these sensations with music. I think this album is beautiful, there is elegance in darkness. I think it’s sad because I know the turmoil and pain it took to write it, and I think it’s powerful because it’s the first time I have truly been honest in my music.

-Barrett Klesko