Atlanta's heaviest slow burners just made their biggest move yet. Cloak have signed to Metal Blade Records and announced Above, Below, & Through, their fourth album and their first for the label, out February 12, 2027. The opening track, Nigredo, Initium, arrived on November 3 with an official video, and preorders are open now.
Cloak Above, Below, and Through: what we know
Cloak formed in Atlanta in 2013 and the lineup is Scott Taysom on vocals and guitar, Max Brigham on guitar, Rafay Nabeel on bass and Matt Morris on drums. Their sound sits where black metal's tremolo storms meet the big, gothic hooks of heavy rock,. Their previous album was Black Flame Eternal. The new record was tracked between January and April 2026 with producer Alex Parra and drum engineer John Douglass, and the band says it was the most seamless album they have ever recorded, the one that finally captured the sound they had always been chasing.
For the first time, Taysom had titles, concepts and lyric ideas in hand before some of the music was written. The songs that came out of that deal with "pathways between life and death, realms between dream and consciousness, shifts between beast and man, and the juxtaposition of shadow and light as spiritual guides," he explains. The title came last, describing something "both all-encompassing and complete, but also something liminal and transitional."
Above, Below, and Through tracklist
Eight songs, built to be heard front to back:
1. Nigredo, Initium
2. Of Shadow & Sleep
3. Into Death's Light
4. Horrors Profound
5. Levitation
6. The Arcane Beckoning
7. The Mare
8. Above, Below, & Through
The closing title track is the one to circle. Cloak call it their magnum opus, a long, linear piece they say "captures the best parts of Cloak at the highest level of song writing and spiritual depth." The painting on the cover is by Jordan Barlow, chosen because he is as deep into esotericism as he is into art. Taysom reads it as a figure in a liminal dream state, floating between the shadow of death and the mother of birth and time.
Vinyl variants and where to preorder
Metal Blade is pressing a run of LP variants: Electric Smoke and Metallic Marble in the US, plus 100g black, and two limited EU colours, an Ivory Black Brown "Ripple" and a Mustard Sea Blue "Melt," each capped at 250 copies. Find them at the Metal Blade Cloak store, or preorder digitally on Bandcamp, and save it on Spotify or Apple Music.
Cloak tour dates
The band plays Mass Destruction Metal Fest in Atlanta on November 7, then heads out in January: Milestone Club in Charlotte on January 13, Heart Of Wither Festival in Richmond on January 14, Metro Baltimore on January 15 and Chapel Of Bones in Raleigh on January 16. Updates land first on the band's Instagram.
Why it matters
This one is Surfacing. Cloak have always refused the costume side of extreme metal. "We strive to maintain a level of seriousness without masks, without the armor and paint," the band says, and a Metal Blade deal puts that sincerity in front of a much bigger room. If Nigredo, Initium hooks you, catch up on the month's heavy releases in our October metal roundup and the wider picks in the best new albums of October.
