Ghostemane's impact on the underground rap world is unquestionable, but as it turns out, the genre-busting artist's influence reaches into more surprising realms, including the noise-rock world. Enter NYC-based weirdos Cinemartyr, whose new album, Opt Out, is due June 17th through Light Sleeper Records. (It's available for pre-order now.) To help usher the LP into the world, the band — helmed by co-vocalists Shane Harrington and Amber Moon Voltson — is releasing a series of covers, and among those is a wonderfully bizarre take on Ghoste's "Lazaretto," off his 2020 full-length, ANTI-ICON. Check it out above via the cover's discomfiting DIY music video, and read Harrington's comments on the song below.
"The first time I heard the original song and its jaw-dropping production work by Ross Robinson and Arthur Rizk, I was totally blown away," Harrington tells us. "It was my introduction to Ghostemane's work and I found it to be visionary in how it distilled elements of industrial, noise and metal music into something totally new. It became one of those songs that got me out of bed in the morning. So as I was putting the finishing touches to our upcoming album, OPT OUT, I thought it might be cool to do a series of covers and release them around the same time our album drops. I wanted to do this as a way to thank/honor the people that were directly inspiring me over the last two years or so. I became obsessed, wondering what 'Lazaretto' might sound like through a more noise-rock lens. It's a weird cover because the arrangements are quite different, with a whole new singing section making up the second verse, as well as two new 'guitar solos' not in the original. And when it came to shooting the accompanying video, well, it took a long time to clean our bathroom here in the Bronx afterwards ... I can still smell the meat. It was a cathartic experience to bring this work to fruition."
