Drawing influence from doom, drone, black metal, and even Americana, Horseback is the post-metal project of Chapel Hill, North Carolina's
Jenks Miller. With a sound that owes as much to
Neurosis and
Earth as it does to
Neil Young, Horseback seamlessly blends the plaintiveness of roots music with the weight of metal, exposing a connection between the genres that is both intuitive and innovative. In a short time,
Miller has delivered a prolific output of epic works, starting with Impale Golden Horn and followed by The Invisible Mountain (which was later reissued by
Relapse) in 2009. Horseback also released the cassette-only Forbidden Planet, which was later bundled together with Impale Golden Horn and reissued as the two-disc set The Gorgon Tongue in 2011.
Miller's fourth full-length as Horseback, Half Blood, was released in 2012. In the summer of 2013,
Relapse issued a three-disc retrospective of singles, split recordings, live tracks, and other rarities as The Plague of Knowing. Horseback followed it up with the dark, sprawling five-track album Piedmont Apocrypha in 2014, while under his own name,
Miller issued a collaborative set with
James Jackson Toth that year, entitled Roads to Ruin on the label. Horseback returned to
Relapse in 2016 with the completely self-produced Dead Ringers. ~ Gregory Heaney, Rovi