Having become one of the UK’s most visible black metal acts on the live circuit, bringing their ritualistic and immersive performances to audiences at club shows and festivals as Damnation, Bloodstock, Incineration, Fortress, Doomsday, Mass Destruction, Samhain, Reaperfest and Eradication, Existentialismus has been recorded, for the first time, as a full band.
7 March: Audio, Glasgow, UK
8 March: Scruffy Murphy’s, Birmingham, UK
9 March: Downstairs at The Dome, London, UK
“It’s inspired by the juxtaposition of this horrible post-truth era with its contradictions and the simple, metaphorical truths that began in ancient religions of the crumbling past. Somewhere between a biblical gospel and a Nietzschean nightmare. As a father, there’s a particular terror in seeing all that our grandfathers built, physically and morally, being torn apart and reduced to a commodity and wondering what kind of world my son will inherit.”
“I am by no means a philosopher – I desperately lack the patience,”A|V admits. “But my observations of the modern Western humane race have become particularly bleak, and this informs my lyrical writing process. Art as a reaction to life and experience. This is laid out in the first track, ‘A Legacy of Sores’, which posits that most of us here, in the current year, have become an alarming pairing of being both too sensitive and yet without any core beliefs to stand on. (‘Wet skin now paper thin, reveals a core of dust’) I think this is a mixture of a post-religious society and the acceleration of technology to the point at which its claws are deeply in us. Have you tried to live without a smartphone recently?”
Existentialismus was recorded and produced by Ian Boult at Stuck On A Name Studios in Nottingham, while the final touches of post-production and mastering were handled by Tore Stjerna (Watain, Mayhem, Deströyer 666) at Necromorbus Studios in Sweden. The striking and immersive cover art is the work of Julia Soboleva.
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