There are plenty of great Meshuggah memes on the internet but it is one of the newest that takes the title of the greatest Meshuggah meme of all time…
Meshuggah’s new album, IMMUTABLE, dropped recently and, as you’d expect, it is bloody incredible. I had high expectations ahead of its release, this band does not do bad albums, but after listening to it on repeat all day for about several days, it occurred to me that IMMUTABLE is my favorite Meshuggah album.
Now, with bands as good as Meshuggah, this kind of thing never happens. Name any band; it could be Metallica, Deftones, Refurbished, Electric Wizard, YOB, Slayer, Radiohead, whoever. No one ever likes a band’s newest album the most, especially so soon after its release. If you haven’t heard IMMUTABLE yet, this should pretty much tell you everything you need to know about it.
And if you’ve yet to hear the new Meshuggah album, I have a brilliant way to introduce you to one of its best tracks, PHANTOMS. I caught this video on YouTube last week and it was just so perfect that I kind of wish it was the actual official music video for PHANTOMS. The editing is slick, the cuts are perfectly executed, and the song has never sounded better.
The Best Meshuggah Meme of ALL TIME
The footage itself is from an Apple TV+ show called Severance, starring none other than the Ice Clown himself, Ben Wyatt (AKA Adam Scott), and reviews are very, very solid, averaging around 8.4 on IMDB. Impressive.
Here’s a synopsis of the show, if you’re interested:
Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives. When a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs.
IMDB
As memes go, the chap behind this recent Meshuggah / Severance mash-up deserves all the praise. It has all the elements that make for a near-perfect meme: it’s funny, the music fits the footage almost perfectly, the timing of the finger-clicking and shaker, for instance, is just amazing, the quick, subtle edits are brilliant too, and – most importantly – the doom-drenched sound of PHANTOMS completely changes the tone and feel of the scene.
Best Meshuggah Breakdown?
I am a huge fan of the new Meshuggah album. It defied all my latent expectations. I didn’t expect the band to venture so far away from its more traditional “sound” as it does on IMMUTABLE. And, as far as breakdowns go, I think the one used in this meme – PHANTOMS – could well be one of Meshuggah’s most iconic breakdowns of all time.
And in an album full of killer riffs, insanely catchy guitar parts (yes, there are plenty of catchy riffs on IMMUTABLE), managing to really stand out as something truly special, as PHANTOMS does, and, my other personal favorite track, The Faultless, is really quite something. Each of these tracks has a distinct “otherness” about them that, at least to my ear, hasn’t been present in the band’s earlier work.
We definitely took our time with this one. And compared to most other albums we’ve done, those have always kind of been very stressful — ‘It needs to be done by now’ — and we always kind of delivered masters at whatever time period was planned, which, a lot of times, meant it was gonna be stressful. So this time we weren’t gonna have that, so we definitely took our time, both writing it but especially as far as the recording process itself.
I think our first deadline for this album, it was supposed to be July 1st [of 2021]. I think we delivered it in, like, October or something, so it was, like, four months later — something like that. We had to kind of go back and forth in the mixing process, and it added time. But we’re stoked how it came out. We like both the production and also as far as the tracks themselves and how it all turned out. So we’re definitely proud of it.
Tomas Haake on Writing / Recording IMMUTABLE
Check out my Meshuggah IMMUTABLE review for a full breakdown of the band’s incredible new album.
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