I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me

After the rousing success of 2022’s *Pain Remains*, New Jersey deathcore crew Lorna Shore returns with their fifth album. Vocalist Will Ramos made his full-length debut with the band on *Pain Remains*, and felt the pressure to deliver again on *I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me*. “I definitely approached this one with 1,000 percent more anxiety, if you can imagine,” he tells Apple Music. “Everyone’s like, ‘What’s the next Lorna Shore album going to be like? It’s got to be the most incredible thing ever.’ That stuff is always in the back of your mind when you’re writing stuff.” The title *I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me* is taken from a line in the album’s opening track, “Prison of Flesh.” “It’s about my family’s history of dementia,” Ramos says, which creates “a fear inside, like you’re running from something. That line is one of my favorites from the song, but honestly, we were just trying to come up with a sick-ass name.” Musically speaking, Ramos and his bandmates—guitarist Adam De Micco, drummer Austin Archey, bassist Michael Yager, and guitarist Andrew O’Connor—expand Lorna Shore’s crushing sonic palette while stripping back some of their renowned technicality in favor of monster grooves on tracks like “Unbreakable,” “In Darkness,” and the Lamb of God-inspired “War Machine.” “We weren’t too strict on keeping it 100 percent deathcore or 100 percent death metal or whatever other people expect Lorna Shore to put out,” Ramos says. “At the end of the day, we just want to put out good music.” Below, he comments on each song. **“Prison of Flesh”** “My grandma, I don’t know where she is in her head at this point. My aunt is slowly forgetting things. Throughout the song, I personify these demons that are coming to get you, but the demons are the void that’s slowly filling you up. The song ends in this big climax like you’ve just been eaten by whatever this void is, until you don’t even know who you are or who the people around you are. It’s my ode to people with dementia and the families who have to deal with that.” **“Oblivion”** “I think *Interstellar* is the best movie ever. There’s a scene where the astronauts go to a water planet that looks beautiful but is actually hell. They realize that they made the worst decision they could have made, and by doing that they screwed themselves. I thought it was a perfect example of the things that we’re doing to ourselves and to our own planet. We’re going to look back and be like, ‘What the hell did we do?’ The song sounds surreal and angelic but also kind of desolated. And that’s exactly how we felt when we watched *Interstellar*.” **“In Darkness”** “This is one of the band’s favorites because it just sounds freaking huge. It’s basically a song that goes out to all of the outcasts. I think all of us that are metalheads know the feeling. Now it’s cool, but back in the day people were probably looking at you weird because you’re a little bit different than what everybody else wants. So it’s like we were raised in a valley of darkness—that’s the metaphor I think of—but in that darkness we became exactly who we are, and that’s awesome.” **“Unbreakable”** “This is completely out there for Lorna Shore. I wanted a song that people would react to like Queen back in the day, when they played ‘We Will Rock You’ and people are clapping their hands, stomping their feet, and they’re part of the show. I wanted that unity in a room full of people that is so powerful that you have this moment when you feel like you’re on top of the world. So this is supposed to be that unifying type of song. It\'s talking about how we’re almost like diamonds: The pressure of everything has squeezed us together and we became this beautiful thing that is perfect and imperfect at the same time, but unbreakable.” **“Glenwood”** “To me, this is the most important song on the album. It’s about when I fixed my ties with my father. My dad and I had a very strange relationship when I was growing up. We had a lot of moments when we did not talk, and the last time was for a lot of years. I don’t think it was out of any kind of animosity. I think we were just so similar and so incredibly stubborn that we fought a lot about dumb stuff. He had to work a lot, which meant he wasn’t home, and I never really saw him. He was working so we could live in a nice area, but as a kid you don’t really see that. You just think he should be home more. But I’m an adult now, and I get it. I wanted to capture that feeling.” **“Lionheart”** “This song is supposed to feel like you’re going into battle. You don’t know what the world is going to throw at you, but you’re going to face it. It’s supposed to be a super-empowering song, like you’re on a horse galloping into this hellfire, but whatever the trials are that you’re about to face, you’re down to do it. We’ve got ‘Unbreakable’ to bring everyone together, and now we’re gonna go fight some shit. Let’s fucking go.” **“Death Can Take Me”** “It’s a song about being in a position of power. As time goes on, you feel like you have to hide how you are, and in a way, it feels incredibly numbing. I think I\'m trying to describe the way that Lorna Shore was when we finally got big, we finally freaking made it, and it just felt like everything that we did, we were walking on eggshells. And you know there’s people who are knocking on your door, just waiting to pull the rug out from under you and take whatever you have. I think you can only be in that position for so long until you’re like, ‘I don’t want this anymore.’ So the song ends with this person jumping off of a tower and basically just being like, ‘I’m going to splat on the ground, and the whole world can watch this happen and know that it was because of everybody that got me to this point.’” **“War Machine”** “We wanted to write a song that was an ode to all the older bands that we listened to growing up, like Lamb of God. But it took a long time to figure out how to write this one. Like on ‘Unbreakable,’ we wanted to pull back a little bit on vocals and rather than shredding the fretboard into oblivion, we wanted to write something that was groovy, heavy, and angry. So we made it sound like you’re in the fucking trenches, the world has been taking from you, you’re pissed, and now it’s time for you to take back from the world.” **“A Nameless Hymn”** “This is basically our anti-religion song. All of us in Lorna Shore were raised Christian but as we got older, we started to stray from our beliefs. We started to realize there’s so much hypocrisy and cruelty involved, and nobody does anything about it. If you’re into metal, there’s probably a good chance that you gave up on the Christian world, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So I wrote this from the perspective of a pious Christian who’s dying. He’s sacrificed so much for something that never came through for him. In his last moments, he looks for redemption but never gets it. He’s angry and resentful and he ends up unseen, unheard.” **“Forevermore”** “When we were writing this, we were describing it as a Viking shooting a flaming arrow at a wooden ship floating off into the sunset. Me and Adam had two big losses in our immediate families, and for me it was my first loss of somebody that was very close to me. It got me all fucked up and it was hard for me grieve because when it happened, I went on tour the next day. This was a young dude who passed away, and it was very unexpected. So I wanted to write a song that was an ode to him. One of my favorite lines in the song is, ‘This isn\'t goodbye, we\'ll meet again on the other side.’ It’s about finally having acceptance of that loss. I’m sad he died, but I’m also happy that I got to live at the same time as him, in some of the same moments with him.”

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The deathcore tag can be as divisive as any in a now confusingly broad metal world. But when bands have the self-evident originality and ingenuity that has propelled LORNA SHORE over the last few years, arguing over subgenre nomenclature is a total waste of time. After a handful of well-received and...

Jack Press reviews the new album from Lorna Shore! Read the review of 'I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me' here on Distorted Sound!