Jazz Metal Trio Kilter Announces Cosmic Concept Album ‘Ten Billion Years’

Franco-American trio Kilter announces the June 19th release of its new album, Ten Billion Years, on Excursus Production.

A concept album depicting nothing less than the birth and death of our solar system, Ten Billion Years unfolds with cosmic-level grandeur, its instrumental compositions exploring spaces between the sounds of John Coltrane, Sunn O))), and Meshuggah.

Based in Paris and New York, Kilter has been operating at the crossroads of jazz and metal since 2018. Founder/electric bassist Laurent David states:

“By merging influences from jazz and metal, two seemingly opposing worlds that have always fascinated me, we create a bold and distinctive musical language. My musical journey reflects a personal tension between different musical traditions. Rather than choosing one over the other, I have embraced the richness of these two complementary artistic approaches.”

David (whose musical journey has included collaborations with Didier Lockwood of Magma, Grammy Award nominee Ibrahim Maalouf, and Folterkammer) is flanked in Kilter by bass saxophonist Ed Rosenberg III (Jerseyband) and drummer Kenny Grohowski (John Zorn, Secret Chiefs 3, Imperial Triumphant). The band’s output so far includes works such as the acclaimed debut full-length, Axiom, and the sprawling opera, La Suspendida.

Two years in the making, Ten Billion Years continues to push Kilter’s legacy forward with another wholly unique and challenging album, mining an epic concept and displaying instrumental mastery in the process. In David’s words, the album follows:

“…the odyssey of a water droplet born in space at the moment of the formation of the solar system, whose journey leads it through matter, life, climate, and time, until its final dissipation into the interstellar void.”

Using bass, drums, and sax, Kilter animates the water droplet’s story, translating into music the undulations of the universe – the cycles of tension and release, spiralling onward, on microscopic and galactic levels. Across ten tracks, David, Rosenberg, and Grohowski move through ominous drones, murky lulls, and violent storms, as if leading a guided tour of the history of existence – from primordial formlessness, to a thriving state of systems in harmony, to a dissolution, back into nothingness.

David states:

“We wanted to imagine what ten billion years might sound like if recorded in 40 minutes.”

A majestic dirge, the album’s first single, “Weather Cycle,” builds from a lurching groove to blastbeat-ridden heights, then repeats, vividly rendering the water droplet’s experience of evaporating into the clouds, then raining down into a flowing river. Decibel Magazine describes it as “vast, disorienting and strangely physical — music that doesn’t just describe transformation, but enacts it in real time.”

David comments:

“Jazz is about elasticity—time, harmony, interaction. It breathes, it moves, it questions itself constantly. Metal is about commitment. When something is there, it’s there. The weight, the repetition, the physical impact—it doesn’t negotiate. Kilter exists somewhere in between those two forces.”

Kilter ‘Ten Billion Years’ album artwork

Accompanying Ten Billion Years, packaged together with the LP, is Ten, a strictly limited, 10-minute EP, available only here in this 7” vinyl format. Ten consists of a series of minute-long compositions, inextricably connected to Ten Billion Years; the album’s ten tracks are slowed-down, stretched-out reinterpretations of the pieces on the EP. For a project exploring the concept of transformation, it is only fitting that Kilter would transform its own compositions in this way.

Inspired in part by the experimentations of John Cage, David states:

“The project treats time-stretching as an artistic gesture in its own right. This process reveals sonic micro-structures and opens up new and unexpected listening spaces… We were interested in stretching time to a point where music stops behaving like music and becomes something else.”

Thought-provoking and spirit-stirring, Ten Billion Years is another impressive offering from a wildly imaginative group. Armed with world-class chops, Kilter is that rare band capable of turning lofty concepts into devastating works of art.

Ten Billion Years Track Listing:

1. Built & Broken
2. Falling & Vaporizing
3. Raining & Raining
4. Rivers & Ocean
5. Depth & Darkness
6. Living & Rising
7. Weather Cycle
8. Awakening & Living
9. Darkness Again
10. Escaping to Infinity