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My fingers dig into the earth
Searching for your ghost
I hear your voice inside my brain
“I’m right here with you”
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This world is dying.
It has been for quite some time, we all know it. Every month it seems there’s a new disaster of increasingly epic proportions. In Australia, where a couple of the wretched scribes of Black Metal Daily call home, bushfires of unprecedented savagery have just ravaged the land with many still burning. The total life lost has been estimated at a staggering, incomprehensible number (into the billions). If you listen, you can hear Mother Earth screaming… and there are some out there who are indeed listening.
Environmentally active / Pelle Ohlin worshipping / raw black metal dyad SEAS OF WINTER are two of those who hear her cries. The US-based pair haven’t eased up on their scathing sonic assault since we last heard from them on their 2019 EP Dead Forest; if anything, here on debut full-length Forest Aflame we find them mired in even deeper agony and with wounds rawer than ever, as their empathic sensitivity to the pain humanity as a species is causing the planet (and, perhaps deservedly, to ourselves) rises to stratospheric new heights. Where Dead Forest lamented, Forest Aflame is the precursor to the end – the agony, the throes of writhing death.
Intended as a prequel to their earlier work, Forest Aflame is still musically based in second wave black metal but, true to the imagery suggested by the title, possesses a desperation and dread unseen from the pair as yet. Composer Mike Snow relentlessly assails your senses with insistent, hypnotic riffs as vocalist Espi Kvlt just sounds like the primal agonized roar of living creatures being burned alive en masse; horrifically raging against whilst simultaneously providing a voice for all the ills of the world, dragging the terrors kicking and screaming into view, smashing them up to your face with your eyes ripped wide open so you can’t help but see. It is truly confronting; not only by way of the aural abrasiveness of it all but the fearless choice of themes usually alien to black metal, too. Of course, as with their first EP, it also comes with the spectre of Per Yngve Ohlin hanging heavy overhead. The late Swedish Morbid/Mayhem vocalist is still of utmost inspiration and affinity to Espi, providing guidance and indeed narrative duties for the album – fitting then that the track we are exclusively premiering for you today is the first proper song of the record, ‘Life Eternal’, the lyrics of which set up the very premise of Pelle providing visions of ecological destruction.
In even better news, not only can you immerse yourself in the first taste of this devastating record here today but album pre-orders are also launching via the great Akashic Envoy Records as we speak, alongside specially curated merch depicting koala skulls in flames (see below). What’s more, as well as still being one of the most thematically interesting acts in underground black metal they still have the biggest hearts, too – in keeping with the album’s message $3 from each tape and $5 from each tape & shirt bundle sold will be donated to an Australian bushfire emergency fund. Once again, this duo don’t merely talk the talk, they walk the walk admirably. Total support. Hails.
Forest Aflame releases digitally 6th March and on cassette 27th March via Akashic Envoy Records. Pre-orders available now.
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Pre-order Forest Aflame on limited cassette tape from the Akashic Envoy webstore HERE.
Support Seas Of Winter:
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