Amaranthe premiered their new video for their latest single ‘That Song’ yesterday, and we have a few things we’d like to say about it.

If you haven’t seen the video yet, as a dedicated metalhead you are going to struggle to refrain yourself from breaking whatever device you are watching it on. Amaranthe are doing the genre all shades of wrong here. It’s not often I get the need to exclusively rant about a release, but this just boiled blood.

First of all, the title, ‘That Song‘ just sounds lazy. But more importantly, the lyrics are so cringing that even a pop-princess might have to think twice about their intrinsic value – songs about riding limousines and dreaming of the champagne life are not metal, nor have they really ever have been. The music has been constructed in the most simple manner to get every advertising agency in the United States on to the ball – you know you are going to hear 30 seconds of that clap-encourging drum beat in the intermission of a baseball game.

And then there’s the video. No Amaranthe, choreographed dance routines are not metal. Playful, cute little faces are not metal. What kind of audience are they really trying to tap here? It’s OK to sell-out a little as you need to pay the bills as a musician, but I don’t actually see who would buy this as an investment to enhance their musical catalogue. It simply makes no sense. It doesn’t really hit the pop market, it doesn’t really hit the metal market – the track lies somewhere in musical no-man’s land. I can’t even begin to establish what Spinefarm were thinking here.

If this is modern metal, this is just plain upsetting. I enjoyed Amaranthe and their take on ‘electro-metal’ in their first couple of albums, using that Swedish Gothenburg death sound as a staple and ramping it up with overclocked synths and catchy hooks. ‘That Song’ demonstrates that those days are long gone. I am now anticipating the band’s upcoming album ‘Maximalism‘ to be the ‘Idiocracy’ of metal albums.

Rant over.