Invidia is an American heavy metal super-group formed in 2015, originally consisting of Travis Johnson from In This Moment and Brian Jackson, formerly of Skinlab. They were soon joined by Matt Snell formally of Five Finger Death Punch, Darren Badorine, the drummer for Six Ounce Gloves; and another ex-Skinlab artist in Marcos Medina Rivera. Despite having been together for only a short time, they have managed to write and produce their debut studio album, ‘As The Sun Sleeps’.The album maintains the heavy feeling throughout, while being pacey enough that its 40 minute length seems to flash by.
“Feed the Fire” is the first single offering from this album. It’s a solid track with some nice vocal parts, but the song just doesn’t excite. Unfortunately, this is not a one time thing. “Now or Never” is notably better, but “Making My Amends,” “Feed the Fire”, both lack anything to really make them memorable. There’s nothing at all special about these two tracks, they feels like any standard heavy metal track. With “Rotten” there’s something different. It’s the first track on the album that I enjoyed listening to, which is a surprise as it comes four tracks in.
“Marching Dead” is another enjoyable track as it’s a track I could see going down quite well in a live setting. They keep the momentum up with “Smell the Kill”, the third track in a row where the band seems to cover all the bases. In the second half of the album, “Set Up” has a little bit of a Fear Factory feel to it and it works surprisingly well within the track itself too, however it is the shortest song on the album, which is a shame as I really wanted more of this track, to me it’s the standout song of the album.
Sadly, after this there is a return to the poor form of the early part of the album, the last three tracks don’t stand out at all, they sound as generic as it is possible for a heavy metal track to sound. There are a few good moments, mainly on the last track “As the Sun sleeps”, but by the end of the album I felt almost let down. I had wanted to really like this album with the talents of the people in the group, but it just lacks anything memorable. I only hope that that the band will gel and that the next offering from Invidia will be as good as we expect from such talented artists.
There are some moments of quality but overall the standard of their work will have to increase tremendously if they don’t want to be quickly forgotten about. Hopefully this album isn’t inductive of what Invidia may well give us in the future. This album would be great if it had come out about seven or eight years ago. The album might have gained some minor notoriety but in today’s music scene with so many bands to choose from I don’t think many people will find anything special in the latest from Invidia.