AN NCS PREMIERE: VARATHRON — “KABALISTIC INVOCATION OF SOLOMON”

Untrodden Corridors of Hades is the new album by the long-running, influential Greek black metal band Varathron, their first since 2009’s Stygian Forces of Scorn. In September we featured the album’s first advance track, “Realm of Obscure”, and followed that (here) with the lyric video for “Arcane Conjuring”. Now we bring you the premiere of a third song — which is the album’s opening track — “Kabalistic Invocation of Solomon”.

In this new long song Varathron gradually build an atmosphere thick with the potent vapors of the occult, drawing the listener ever deeper into the mysteries of a dark ritual. At the beginning and again later, a choral chant echoes as if being sung within a catacomb, accompanied by the massive booming of drums and the slow rumbling of the bass.

While maintaining a processional pace anchored throughout by a potent rhythm section, eventually the band start adding the layers of an exotic guitar melody, which penetrates more and more deeply the more it continues. It’s solemn and majestic, almost like an offering to a terrible power that is vast and endless — and the vocalist’s truly bestial snarls and jagged-edged shrieks seem to personify that power in all its malevolent glory.

Varathron are masters of the kind of heavy black metal that merits the word “epic”, and here they have created a grim but arresting song that seems to function as a statement of intent for this new album.

Untrodden Corridors of Hades will be released by Agonia Records on November 21 in Europe and December 9 in the U.S. and it can be pre-ordered here. The album’s cover art is a painting by the formidable Mark Riddick.

https://www.facebook.com/VarathronOfficial