Last week, it was announced that Atlanta, Georgia’s heavy rocking upstarts Royal Thunder — who are so hard to pin to a single genre that one has to resort to vague phrases like “heavy rock upstarts” to describe them — were hitting the road in September alongside Pallbearer and Samothrace for a tour dubbed “Paths to Oblivion.” No other way to say it, these are three killer bands, riding at the top of their game — all of whom have released killer albums this year (Samothrace‘s is out shortly) — and this is the kind of tour that years from now you look back on and say, “I saw these bands when…”

Check out the dates on the poster below (click to enlarge):

To mark the occasion, Relapse Records — which put out Royal Thunder‘s second album, CVI, late in May — has offered up two free copies of that full-length for me to giveaway.

Couldn’t be more stoked on that fact, as CVI‘s always-consistent but resoundingly amorphous sonic scope ties the band no more to Baroness than it does to Neurosis, no more to Mastodon than Fleetwood Mac, no more to Kylesa than Alice in Chains. Between sprawling nine-minute epics like “Shake and Shift” and “Blue,” aggressive bursts like that of the riffy “Whispering World,” the Americana atmospherics of the later “Minus” and the nigh-on-miraculous flow of all these elements which in less capable hands would be disparate and not in the slightest cohesive, it’s a perfect example of the genre-bending mindset that seems to be driving the next generation of US Heavy. Makes a good freebie, in other words.

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post. Make sure to fill out the email address in the form so I can get in touch with you if you win. I’ll pick winners next week and the albums will come from Relapse. If you want to say thanks, I’d recommend hitting up their Thee Facebooks.

For a refresher on CVI, here’s the album streaming in its entirety, courtesy of the Royal Thunder Bandcamp page:

Royal Thunder is Mlny Parsonz, Lee Smith, Josh Weaver and Josh Coleman. They’re on Thee Facebooks here.