Treble's Top 25 Metal Albums of 2021

Excelsior! It’s the hail of yore that one should go ever onward and upward. And so, fittingly Onwards and Downwards is the occultist Swedish band Alastor’s clever call to arms... and also a reflection of our collective dark state of mind these days. “If our last album Slave to the Grave were about death, this record is more about madness,” says guitarist Hampus Sandell. “You can look at the whole record as one person’s gradual slip into insanity. An ongoing nightmare without end. It also sums up the state of the world around us as this year has clearly shown.” Alastor is heavy doom rock for the wicked and depraved. Drenched in heavy, distorted darkness and steeped in occult horror that will make your skin crawl and ears cry sweet tears of blood, the band is revitalized in 2021 with meticulously crafted songs and new drummer Jim Nordström bringing a hard-hitting and precise energy. “It’s a more focused record but at the same time it’s more personal and naked. More raw emotion and pain,” Hampus says. The band recorded the album with the help of Joona Hassinen of Studio Underjord, who has helped with mixing since their ”Blood on Satan’s Claw” EP in 2017. Christoffer Karlsson of The Dahmers also assisted with overdubs and encouraged the band to demo the material early on, aiding in the album’s more deliberate and tighter feel. From the first note of opener “The Killer In My Skull” the guitars are far thicker and out front than ever, and Nordström pummels the snare and kick like a young Dave Grohl. Bassist/vocalist Robin Arnryd’s chorus-drenched voice soars above it all like a one-man choir, at times harmonizing beautifully with shimmering Hammond organ notes. Nary a moment is wasted on the droning navel-gazing of lesser bands. Particularly, the driving anthem “Death Cult” which sounds like it would fit comfortably on QOTSA’s Songs For The Deaf, though there’s considerably more heft here. The title track pays its due to the Devil’s tritone in a marvelously woven framework of intertwining melodies befitting the album’s theme of descent into madness. The quartet released its epic 3-song debut album Black Magic in early 2017 via Twin Earth Records, followed by the 2-track “Blood On Satan’s Claw” EP on Halloween the same year. Joining forces with RidingEasy Records in 2018, Alastor summoned the 7-track hateful gospel Slave To The Grave, which was packed with dynamic twists and turns, and funereal girth. It was met with considerable praise, setting the stage for the band’s greatest step onward (and upward... or downward, depending on your preferences.) Onwards and Downwards will be available on LP, CD and download on May 28th, 2021 via RidingEasy Records.

On their first album in eight years, Liverpool death metal titans Carcass double down on the infectious harmonized riffage and medical-atrocity lyrics of their 2013 comeback album, *Surgical Steel*. To say that *Torn Arteries* is long-awaited is an understatement: The album was originally supposed to be out in early 2020. In fact, Carcass released the first single, “Under the Scalpel Blade,” in late 2019. When the pandemic hit, the band decided to delay the record’s release until they could safely tour. To tide fans over, they released the four-song *Despicable* EP in October 2020. But now, the moment of truth has arrived, and Carcass vocalist/bassist Jeff Walker isn’t giving any spoilers. “I don’t want to talk about the lyrics because you’re giving the game away,” he tells Apple Music. “It defeats the object of me not wanting them on the album, and you’re kind of instilling in people how they should be thinking.” Still, we managed to extract some comments from him on some key tracks. **“Dance of Ixtab”** “Ixtab is the Mayan goddess of suicide by hanging. I’ve no idea how I stumbled across it, honestly. I could say I was on an alien peninsula or something, but that’s bullshit. Maybe I was watching *From Dusk Till Dawn*. I was probably doing some ‘research,’ and we all know what that means these days: Google. But it’s not glorifying suicide or dwelling on people being depressed. It’s a bit more sleazy than that.” **“Eleanor Rigor Mortis”** “If there’s anything that we dusted off from the old days for this album, it’s this song title. We joked about using it way back on the first album. It falls into this Kinks/Beatles quintessential Englishness that we’ve always incorporated into Carcass. That was the vibe I was going for. I’m sure \[Carcass guitarist\] Bill \[Steer\] cringes over the fact that I bothered to use it.” **“Under the Scalpel Blade”** “We’ve managed to release this song three times now. With every album, you have a song that kind of becomes a single. So, we released this at the end of 2019 as a flexi single with *Decibel* when the album was supposed to be out in 2020. But then, of course, that didn’t happen. When we decided to do the EP, we had three songs that are not on the album, so we brought out one album track as well. And, of course, the song has to be on the album itself.” **“The Devil Rides Out”** “This is a movie title I’ve always loved, but the song has nothing to do with that. There’s always been anti-religious songs, but this is an anti-Satanic song. Satanism is just as fucking stupid as Christianity or every other ‘ism,’ you know? I really fancied the idea of doing a song that could be picked up by Christians and then they run to town thinking it’s a pro-Christian song. I love the idea of the label servicing some Christian radio stations with this track, but it never happened.” **“Kelly’s Meat Emporium”** “This was a real shop in Liverpool, but it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s somewhere I’d pass occasionally, and I just thought it was quaint because one minute it was open and then for years it was kind of derelict. To me, it was just a sign of the times. But the title is totally disconnected from the lyrics. It’s like ‘The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue’ from the EP: It’s not like I watched the movie and wrote a song about it. I just liked the title. Like ‘Eleanor Rigor Mortis,’ it feels quintessentially British.”

=== ORDER NOW === metalodyssey.8merch.com 2x12"LP GATEFOLD - Out June 8 (incl. Bandcamp Digital Download and Streaming) • Ltd 500: 250 black vinyl, 250 cloudy purple*** • 140gr. vinyls • 350gr. gatefold sleeve, 5mm spine • Black inner sleeves • Outer plastic sleeve *** exclusive to our Eshop A5-DIGIPACK CD - Out May 21 (incl. Bandcamp Digital Download and Streaming) • Limited to 500 copies • Deluxe DVD-sized Digipack, 8-page booklet LTD T-SHIRT - Out May 21 • Screen printed on B&C #E150 black garment ______________________ The solitary project of the French musician named Asthâghul, ESOCTRILIHUM release their 6th album in 5 years of underground activity, sure to cement the great consensus obtained with 2020's “Eternity Of Shaog”. “Dy'th Requiem For The Serpent Telepath” picks up right where its predecessor left off, at times addressing the band's stylistic formula towards doom metal territories, and offering a better amalgamation of symphonic sounds within the unique blend of mystic black and death metal ESOCTRILIHUM is known for. The result is as dark, majestic and psychedelic as Dhomth's disturbing cover painting, perfectly reflecting the concept behind this work. The album winds its way through four sections and 12 tracks, telling the story of the death, transfiguration and rebirth of the Serpent Telepath – one of the many entities that populate ESOCTRILIHUM's mental dimensions of horror (and clearly an astral projection of Asthâghul himself) – in a blistering crescendo of tortured visions and psychic delirium. Thanks to its rich textures full of amazing sonic inventions in the service of a creative songwriting perfectly balanced between atmosphere and experimentation, “Dy'th Requiem For The Serpent Telepath” is at the same time sumptuously melodious and irrepressibly brutal, the umpteenth demonstration of the talent of an artist never afraid to let his inner demons free to haunt him.

For their second full-length, doom outfit King Woman unfurls a concept album loosely based on John Milton’s *Paradise Lost*, a 17th-century epic about Lucifer’s temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. “I was raised Christian, but I’m not Christian anymore,” vocalist Kris Esfandiari tells Apple Music. “There’s a lot of Christian mythology going on in here—stories about some of the major characters from the Bible, like Christ, Adam and Eve, Lilith and Lucifer.” Before she had the album’s concept, Esfandiari had already written the song “Morning Star” about the fallen angel Lucifer. Then a fan gave her an old copy of *Paradise Lost* at a show. “I’d been working on the record, but that was the missing piece of the puzzle,” she says. “It was like an epiphany. So I just went down that road, and here we are. I hope I did it justice.” Below, she discusses each track on *Celestial Blues*. **“Celestial Blues”** “The poem at the beginning comes from these blackout periods I had when I was younger—I guess they were seizures. I had one in the shower, and I woke up screaming and making these crazy noises. My mom ran into the shower fully clothed and started praying in tongues while water was just pouring on both of us. She was trying to cast the spirit of death out of me. But the song itself is about frustration—gender dysphoria and being stuck on this planet of suffering and pain.” **“Morning Star”** “This is partially about Lucifer. To me, they’re kind of an androgynous, Joker type of character who has been scapegoated—and I wanted Lucifer to tell their side of the story. But it’s also about personal experiences where I felt I was a scapegoat in a situation. And that feeling you’ve lost your mind and gone to hell, basically, and come out on the other side a little deranged or crooked and at the same time magnificent. You don’t recognize yourself, but you’ve become this kind of Joker-esque character because of everything you went through.” **“Boghz”** “There are a few translations for this word, but in Arabic it means ‘hatred.’ I’m Iranian, so in Farsi you could translate it as like the lump in your throat before you’re about to cry—or the feeling of pushing it down, like, ‘I’m not going to cry.’ For me, it’s more of a feeling, so I like that it has a few meanings. The song is about a relationship that I tried to make work, but the other person just kept beating me down and being so sadistic. I never really gave up, but I definitely had to walk away in order to survive. A lot of this record is about that relationship, in a way.” **“Golgotha** “This means ‘the place of the skull,’ and it’s where Christ was crucified. That was almost the album title, actually—I have it tattooed on my arm—but I just felt like *Celestial Blues* was more appropriate. The song is about karmic cycles. There’s a lyric in there that says, ‘The snake eats its tail, we return again to this hell,’ which is about how we repeat the same things over and over again and have a hard time learning our lessons. It’s also about the death and resurrection of myself, so there’s a lot to unpack there.” **“Coil”** “This is a continuation of ‘Golgotha’—it’s about the resurrection. To me, it’s like a hardcore gospel song or something. I’ve dealt with a lot of people in the past few years that really tested my patience and my faith in myself, people who made my life difficult and tried to tell me I couldn’t accomplish my dreams—people who insisted that I give all my magic away to them. All those people have since apologized to me, but the song is my declaration that I’m unstoppable. It’s the song of the warrior.” **“Entwined”** “This is a love song about surrendering to emotional availability and commitment. It’s kind of a confession of undying love. It’s about someone from my past. One of their parents passed away from cancer while we were seeing each other, and they kind of disappeared suddenly from my life because of that. So this is my parting gift to them.” **“Psychic Wound”** “We did a video for this one that’s kind of a vampire orgy. In the intro, it’s like I have this clear reflection of myself and then I get involved with these vampires. They start to approach me, it’s a vampire orgy, and then I have a psychotic break. At the end, I snap out of it and I’m returned to my original reflection. There’s a few meanings, but it’s basically about how we all have these wounds from our past, and sometimes vampiric people can sniff those wounds and take advantage of your pain. It’s also about having sex with the devil, so, you know—side note.” **“Ruse”** “This is a song about getting cheated on and taking your revenge. When you get cheated on, you might want to hurt the person who hurt you and feel like you never really knew who they were. There’s a line that says, ‘I’ll wait up for you tonight, you’ll forfeit our love.’ So it’s just about finding out some information that you’re shocked about, and then taking your revenge.” **“Paradise Lost”** “I relate this one back to the Garden of Eden, Lilith, Lucifer, Adam, Eve, God, forbidden fruit, impossible love and betrayal. I feel like this one is about the complexity of relationships and how sometimes they don’t always work out. But it’s also the story that’s been told since the beginning of time—the Garden of Eden.”

Seven years in the making, Papangu's debut record is a concept album inspired by ecological eschatology and the modernist literature of Northeastern Brazil—a hardy, arid region historically plagued by inequality and violence. Sung in the band's native Portuguese, the album tells the tale of a cangaceiro—a bandit from Brazil's backlands—who, after being shown a vision of his fate, tries to change it through ritual sacrifice. When his botched attempt backfires and sets off a chain reaction, the protagonist seeks a Faustian pact in order to stop the forthcoming environmental disaster. Blending influences from sludge and zeuhl, Papangu's fluid sound is sieved through an unique mesh of prog, stoner rock, post rock and the rhythms of Northeastern Brazil, sounding as if Mastodon and mid-70s King Crimson had teamed up to concoct a Magma-like soundtrack to an anti-Bolsonaro play by Ariano Suassuna. Sludgy riffs are augmented by unusual song structures, syncopated rhythms, unhuman drumming—courtesy of Torstein Lofthus, the juggernaut behind prog legends Elephant9 and blackjazzers SHINING—and guest performances by Brazilian keyboard mages Uaná Barreto and Luis Souto Maior on Minimoog and Prophet-6, along with Seven Impale's saxophonist Benjamin Mekki Widerøe.

=== ORDER NOW === metalodyssey.8merch.com 12"LP VINYL - Out late October (incl. Bandcamp Digital Download and Streaming) • Ltd 200: 100 black vinyl, 100 marbled brown *** • 140gr. vinyl • 350gr. sleeve, 3mm spine • Black inner sleeves • Outer plastic sleeve *** exclusive to our Eshop DIGIPACK CD - Out September 3 (incl. Bandcamp Digital Download and Streaming) • Limited to 200 copies • 4-Panel Digipack, 12-page booklet _________________________ SERMON OF FLAMES are an Irish duo that plays blackened death metal incorporating harsh noise and death industrial sounds into their style. Formed in 2019, the band subsequently set to work on the “Heralds Of The Untruth” demo, a do-it-yourself release made available as a limited run of cassettes now sold out. “I Have Seen The Light, And It Was Repulsive” is SERMON OF FLAMES' first full length album and a necessary evolution from the formula of the beginnings. Taking those elements that were crucial to the demo as well as its underground ethos, the duo expanded upon them within a professional studio, finally forging a truly representative and unique work of uncompromising extreme metal, a monolith of filth and violence erected in homage to ever burning hatreds. Recorded and mixed by Chris McQuillan at Úath Recordings, then mastered by Tom Dring at Vagrant Recordings, “I Have Seen The Light, And It Was Repulsive” is as creative as it's chaotic and dissonant. Malicious and brutal death metal riffs cloaked in black intersect with devastating rhythms, while cavernous choirs of growls and screams sing oppressive psalms of horror and despair. With a simple yet evocative cover art by tattoo artist Richard Carson, SERMON OF FLAMES' debut album is a boiling, corrosive magma of evil and negativity, centered around the curse of life and the rejection of faith. A nihilistic vision too unbearable for many, but surely a balm for the eyes of those who are constantly fleeing from the light. Follow the heralds of the untruth. Offer yourself to the void.

Out from the wastes of Cimmeria, Steel Bearing Hand has come to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth with booted feet, overthrow the heretical tyrants and sacrilegious interlopers who corrupt the sanctity of Metal, and... SLAY IN HELL

“We wanted it to be bold. We didn’t want it to be an allusion to anything. We just wanted it to be what it is, like when you see a Renaissance painting called *Man Holding Fish at the Market While Other People Walk By*.” So says vocalist/guitarist Adam Vallely of The Armed about the title of the band’s fourth album, *Ultrapop*. The previously anonymous Detroit hardcore collective revealed their identities with the record’s announcement in early 2021—or so they’d have listeners believe. And while Vallely (if that’s his real name) certainly seems to be involved, along with folks named “Dan Greene,” “Cara Drolshagen,” and Urian Hackney (an actual person and drummer), one never knows. What seems almost certainly true is that *Ultrapop* features guest appearances from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), and Kurt Ballou (Converge), who may or may not have produced the album. Below, Vallely discusses each track. **“Ultrapop”** “We wanted to open with a track that immediately made clear what our intentions were on this record. We wanted to throw you in the deep end. A big element aesthetically was trying to combine the most beautiful things with the most ugly things: There’s these really nice vocal arrangements that are pretty up-front, and then you have these power electronics and harsh noise accompanying it. So putting this song first is incredibly intentional. If you don\'t like this, you might as well get the fuck out right now.” **“All Futures”** “Whereas ‘Ultrapop’ is throwing you in the deep end, we wanted this to be like a distillation of all the various elements you hear on the album. We wanted it to be very catchy, very cleverly composed, and really good. The first guitar lead is very St. Vincent-influenced, then Jonni Randall’s lead in the chorus has a very Berlin-era Iggy sound. Lyrically, it’s an anti-edgelord anthem. It’s saying that just pointing out your distaste for things is not inherently a contribution. It’s okay to dislike things, but if you’re devoting all your energy to contrarianism, you’re just anti.” **“Masunaga Vapors”** “Keisuke Masunaga was one of the illustrators of the \[anime\] show *Dragon Ball Z*. He had a very distinct style with angularity and noses and eyes. But the song itself is based on Stéphane Breitwieser, who is a super notorious and prolific art thief from France who felt really connected to the pieces he would steal from museums. It’s a super chaotic but kind of uplifting song, and the whole thing is a confrontation about ownership and attribution in art and what belongs to who—and does any of it matter?” **“A Life So Wonderful”** “The title just seemed like a really not nihilistic, not metal, not hardcore thing to say, and it’s applied somewhat ironically to the lyrical content of the song. Dan Greene wrote about 90 percent of it. He always works in this MIDI program that sounds like an old Nintendo game and then we have to apply real instrumentation. Lyrically, it’s about the deterioration of truth as a societal construct and how dangerous that can be. I know, a real original theme for 2021, but that’s what it’s about—information warfare, destabilization, and the eventual numbness that can come from that.” **“An Iteration”** “This song was actually written almost in full during the *Only Love* sessions. But I think we all just felt that it was a bridge too far for that album, contextually—which was a real hard decision to make and made us feel like adult artists. But it’s one of my favorites on either of the records. Ben Chisholm really helped us nail this one and make it stronger. You can hear Nicole Estill from True Widow doubling my main vocal on everything, and then you can hear Jess Hall, who also sang on ‘Ultrapop,’ doing the hooks, because we wanted those to be real poppy.” **“Big Shell”** “Around 2016, we started doing these splinter groups where just a few of us would play in Detroit under different names. We would play material that we were not sure if it was Armed material. This is one of those songs, and we decided it was definitely a good song for The Armed. It’s probably the most rock-oriented track on the album, and it’s really satisfying. Cara wrote the lyrics, but I know she’s speaking about presenting your real self to the world and letting anyone who doesn’t like it deal with it on their own accord, which is sort of the spirit of *Ultrapop* throughout.” **“Average Death”** “This is the very first song we worked on with Ben Chisholm, and it really cemented the collaboration. It’s got this cool angular drum beat and this weird, lurching sort of groove throughout. Ben added a lot of gorgeous synths and the vocal break leading into the chorus. Urian did this undulating blastbeat that gives it these cool accents. But it’s a huge bummer lyrically—it’s about the abuses of actresses in 1930s Hollywood, that studio structure which is unfortunately a systemic issue that has not quite rooted itself out nearly a hundred years later.” **“Faith in Medication”** “The bassline is kinda crazy, and there\'s a guitar solo by Andy Pitcher towards the end. He’s channeling serious \'90s-era Reeves Gabrels—you can hear that the guitar doesn\'t have a headstock. Urian is absolutely beating the shit out of the drums with those cascading fills. Dan is obsessed with the visuals of \'80s and \'90s mecha-based anime where you see the fucking Gundams having some sort of dogfight in space. That\'s how he wanted the song to feel, and I think it absolutely feels like that.” **“Where Man Knows Want”** “The track opens very sparse, and then it quickly lets the normal The Armed reveal itself in the choruses. Not unlike ‘All Futures,’ the beginning clearly owes a lot to Annie Clark. Kurt Ballou is playing everything you hear at the end that sounds like a stringed instrument. He’s the king of playing those heavy chords punctuated by feedback. Lyrically, the song is talking about the creative curse, the obsession with having a new idea and executing it—and tricking yourself into thinking that when you finish this, you can rest. But it never quite works that way.” **“Real Folk Blues”** “Like ‘Masunaga Vapors,’ this song references a real person—Tony Colston-Hayter, who was this legendary acid-house rave promoter from the \'80s who then in the mid-2010s was arrested for hacking into bank accounts and stealing a million pounds. The reason we became obsessed with the story is because he was hacking into the accounts using this insane machine that was like a pitch-shifting pedal taped to something else that basically allowed him to alter the gender of his voice and play prerecorded bank messages that would trick the systems to get into what he needed to get into.” **“Bad Selection”** “This one was largely experimental as we were crafting it. We just wanted to break new ground with something, I think it’s very successful at doing that. Lyrically, it’s interesting because there’s a duality that presents the listener with a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. With the chorus, is it about someone who’s keeping the faith in a better future, or is it about people being blinded by a violent faith in better days that had already gone by? One is really optimistic and one is very sinister, and they allude to real-world things.” **“The Music Becomes a Skull” (feat. Mark Lanegan)** “This takes an unexpected dark and dismal turn at the end of the sugar rush that is the rest of the record. Dan had a specific vision for the vocals that our immediate group of collaborators couldn’t really execute on. We were talking about it with Ben Chisholm and Dan said, ‘We need Mark Lanegan to sing on it.’ I think he meant we needed someone that sounds like that. We didn’t expect to actually get Mark Lanegan. But within 24 hours, we had vocals from Mark Lanegan. As inconvenient as a collaborative effort like The Armed can be, it can also lead to something like this. I mean, I’m singing with Mark Lanegan on this. It’s so fucking cool.”

On their fifth album, Swedish goth-metal maestros Tribulation deliver an ode to the supernatural inspired by elemental magic and mythology. Taking its title from a line in a song by German darkwave mysterios Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows, *Where the Gloom Becomes Sound* is a ghostly and dramatic record woven with the snaky melodies and death metal propulsion that have become Tribulation’s signature. “The title is all about the music,” guitarist Adam Zaars tells Apple Music. “And not only on this album—I would say that it describes what we\'ve been trying to do ever since our first album.” Seven of *Gloom*’s ten tracks were written by recently departed guitarist Jonathan Hultén (who has since passed the torch to Joseph Tholl of VOJD); the other three by Zaars. Below, he takes us through the songs. **In Remembrance** “Out of my songs, this is the one that I feel the most connected to or pleased with because it has some kind of fresh quality to it. The main riff that goes into the verses just felt right, but I had some trouble completing the song, so I got some help from Robert Pehrsson \[of Death Breath\] and Joseph Tholl. And then we incorporated some Swedish lyrics, which we’ve tried to do a few times in the past, but it always comes out sounding like some kind of trollish black metal. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s not very Tribulation. This time we made it work.” **Hour of the Wolf** “This is a Jonathan song. It’s one of the more simple songs, I guess, which is always more difficult, I think. With less ingredients, you’ve got to cook them well. Jonathan said he was inspired by Roky Erickson and the Hungarian band Tormentor, especially their song ‘Elizabeth Bathory.’ Not to make it sound exactly like that, of course, but that was at least where he was starting. And I think it’s probably our most pop-rock kind of song so far. I was skeptical about it at first, but it really worked in the end and I’m really glad we recorded it.” **Leviathans** “This is a very dramatic song, and probably one of my favorites from the record. It’s also a Jonathan song. The spoken-word part is inspired by the recordings of Aleister Crowley—*The Great Beast Speaks*, I think it’s called—where he’s spitting out invocations. But in the song it’s Jonathan speaking. We wanted it to have that sample-like feeling, but we wanted to make it ourselves. Both this song and ‘Hour of the Wolf’ also have electronic drums on them, which is a new thing for us as well. It’s always fun to experiment with sound, and a small detail can add so much to a song.” Dirge of a Dying Soul “That\'s probably the most depressing song on the album—and I\'m saying that as a very positive thing. Again, it\'s a Jonathan song, and I don\'t want to speak for him, of course, but I imagine that this is maybe the most personal song on the album—lyrically, at least. From what I hear, it seems to be inspired by the first record of Dissection, which is very cool in my book, and by classical music as well. It\'s one of the songs that, along with ‘Inanna,’ I really liked the first time I heard them. They sounded very inspired and kind of set the vibe for me to follow with the rest of my composing on the album.” **Lethe** “This is also a Jonathan song, and that’s him playing the piano. In the past, we used to switch around when it came to organs and pianos and synthesizers. Sometimes I would play; sometimes \[vocalist/bassist\] Johannes \[Andersson\] would play, and sometimes Jonathan. But he’s obviously been practicing a lot, so he’s been the go-to guy for piano parts on the last two records. This piece was very much inspired by Swedish folk music, and I think he would agree that it sounds almost like it came off an album called *Jazz in Swedish* by a guy called Jan Johansson. Wonderful, wonderful record.” **Daughter of the Djinn** “The word ‘genie’ comes from ‘djinn,’ if I’m not mistaken, but this song is not about djinns, actually. The phrase ‘Daughter of the Djinn’ comes from Aleister Crowley, and it’s referring to hashish—but it’s not a song about hashish, either. It’s really about that old saying that one man’s food is another man’s poison—and a metaphor for the idea that the world, in my opinion, is never really black or white. It’s always gray, and I think it’s important to remember that things are more complicated than they seem to be when reading the news and so on.” **Elementals** “I don’t know what Jonathan was thinking about when he wrote this song, but when we were recording it, I could only think about what we’ve labeled as ‘post-Blaze \[Bayley\] Iron Maiden’—albums like *Brave New World* and *Dance of Death*. There’s something there that reminds me of it, but musically I think you can hear the red thread that goes throughout the album most explicitly.” **Inanna** “Innana is a goddess that went down to her sister in the underworld, and—like every myth—there are variations of the story. But as we know it, it’s from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the very first \[version\], I believe. This is one of the first songs Jonathan played for us that he’d written, and it immediately felt completely right. Like ‘Dirge of a Dying Soul,’ it really set the vibe for where we were going on this album.” **Funeral Pyre** “This is the last of my songs. It’s almost a heavy metal song to some extent, and one that could have gone in many different directions. At one point, it almost turned into a 10-minute song, but Jonathan was feeling that it really wasn’t very strong, so I had to go back home and rewrite a lot of it. This turned it into a much shorter song than I imagined, and I think this was a really good thing that Jonathan did, because it turned out great, I think. That push really made it into what it is now.” **The Wilderness** “This is an interesting song—Jonathan did the music and I wrote the lyrics. When listening to the music, I really felt there was a strong sense of story—not quite a fairy tale, but something along those lines. It’s probably the longest lyrics I’ve ever written—I think there are seven verses or something. I was reading John Woodroffe’s early-20th-century English translation of the Shat-Chakra-Nirupana, which is about the chakras that became so popular in the West. Some versions of this idea say there are seven chakras in the body, so that became the metaphor for the verses.”

ORDER THE SECOND VINYL PRESSING HERE: www.20buckspin.com/collections/wode DIGITAL DOWNLOADS CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: listen.20buckspin.com/album/burn-in-many-mirrors