Kilter operates in a space where ‘genre’ is no longer useful. On “Weather Cycle,” the Franco-American trio bend jazz elasticity and metal force into something far stranger — a piece that feels less like a song than a system in motion.
Taken from the upcoming Ten Billion Years, “Weather Cycle” forms a crucial moment in the album’s sweeping conceptual arc, which traces the birth and death of our solar system through the journey of a single water droplet. It’s an ambitious premise, but Kilter approaches it with precision rather than spectacle, building tension through repetition, instability, and gradual transformation.
Musically, the track surges between lurching low-end grooves and explosive, blast-driven peaks, never fully settling into either. Laurent David’s electric bass anchors the composition while Ed Rosenberg III’s bass saxophone and Kenny Grohowski’s drumming pull it in opposing directions — stretching, compressing, and reshaping time as it unfolds. Grohowski, known for his work with Imperial Triumphant, brings a level of controlled volatility that helps bridge the band’s jazz and metal extremes, while the trio as a whole channels something that sits somewhere between the spiritual intensity of John Coltrane, the tectonic weight of Sunn O))) and the precision violence of Meshuggah.
That sense of instability is central to the track’s role within the album’s narrative. As David explains:
“ ‘Weather Cycle’ is where the droplet loses individuality. Up to that point, it still exists as something you can follow—a trajectory, a presence. In this track, it gets absorbed into a system that’s bigger than it… It’s no longer ‘a drop,’ it’s part of a continuous transformation.”
“Musically, it’s about instability that never collapses. Patterns repeat but never land the same way twice. There’s a sense of circulation without resolution—like something constantly reorganizing itself… You’re not following an event, you’re inside a mechanism.”
That push and pull — between control and dissolution, structure and chaos — defines Ten Billion Years as a whole. Developed over two years, the album expands on Kilter’s already singular approach, translating cosmic-scale ideas into something tactile and immediate. In David’s words, it’s an attempt to imagine “what ten billion years might sound like if recorded in 40 minutes.”
If “Weather Cycle” is any indication, the answer is something vast, disorienting and strangely physical — music that doesn’t just describe transformation, but enacts it in real time.
Pre-order Ten Billion Years here, and watch the video for “Weather Cycle” below:
The post Video Premiere: Kilter – ‘Weather Cycle’ appeared first on Decibel Magazine.