The Toronto-based black metal band Panzerfaust are about to embark on a very ambitious project. With their fourth album, The Suns of Perdition I: War, Horrid War, they will begin a planned tetralogy of full-length releases devoted to some of history’s most awful events. This first chapter in that monumental effort, which will be released by Eisenwald on June 14th, takes as its subject matter many terrible occurrences of the past century, creating a synthesis that mirrors a vision of the future described by George Orwell as “a boot stamping on a human face forever”.
Today we bring you the first advance track from …War, Horrid War, a song of punishing physical power and brain-mangling intensity, yet one that proves to be as spellbinding as it is titanically ravaging. The band describe the inspiration for the song’s name, “The Day After Trinity“, in these words:
“The title of the album’s lead single, and opening track, is derived from the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bomb detonation in 1945. The code name for the nuclear test, ‘Trinity,’ was coined by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and inspired by the poetry of John Donne. In a 1980 documentary covering the detonation, Oppenheimer is asked for his thoughts on Sen. Robert Kennedy’s efforts to urge President Lyndon B. Johnson to initiate talks to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. ‘It’s 20 years too late,’ he replies. After a long pause, he states, ‘It should have been done the day after Trinity.'”
An extravagant, blood-curdling howl, plundering drums, and long roaring chords open this storm of sound, almost immediately creating an atmosphere that’s bleak and intense. Over mountainous bass tones, a delirious, flickering lead surfaces, and manages to put its hooks in your head even though it is the sound of fear and pain. The riffing becomes a harrowing assault, punctuated by gigantic booms, but no less harrowing than the pure terror of the vocalists’ shattering shrieking and heartless roars.
The song is bone-fracturing, but the riffing evolves into a shimmer of dissonant sound that further deepens the atmosphere of enveloping terror. A swirling lead forms a bridge to a truly head-hammering, head-spinning assault on the senses, like the frenzy of a mind caught in the midst of an artillery cannonade. And with cauterizing roars and flesh-flensing shrieks, and the resurgent flicker of those demented strings over a titanic drum-and-bass upheaval, the song surges to a crescendo of senses-shattering explosiveness.
And yes, for such an overpowering and disturbing piece of music, its grip is so fierce that it also becomes perversely mesmerizing.
This is a great song to choose for a first single, but rest assured it’s not an outlier. The entire album is stunningly powerful. Credit for the production and mix goes to Greg Dawson at BWC Studios in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and the album was mastered by Sergei Lazar at CDM Records Studio in Moscow, Russia. The album comes recommended for fans of Deathspell Omega, Dissection, Marduk, and Funeral Mist.
Eisenwald will release The Suns of Perdition I: War, Horrid War on CD, 12″ vinyl, and digitally. Pre-orders are available now via the link below.
P.S. We’ve included the lyrics to this new song right after the music stream (they’re worth reading).
PRE-ORDER:
https://panzerfaust.bandcamp.com/album/the-suns-of-perdition-chapter-i-war-horrid-war
PANZERFAUST:
http://www.facebook.com/panzerfaust.bm.official
LYRICS
On the day divinity rejects the order,
They’ll bend the mirror back unto the gift of fire
That reflects in the master’s eye.
They’ll break the grand design, to bring forth the healer,
Feast or famine,
The Wage of sin is death.
Hold them like a teething child.
And show them the sins of their fathers.
Waste them, and their waste to the world.
And collapse, as madmen lead the blind.
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how do your gardens grow?”
A failed womb, of their ART.
Early ripe, early rotten.
And the world is rotten; like a fallen fruit.
Ring the war chime.
Violently project it inside
The fanged chasm;
A hellscape collosass
That bleeds them like fucking swine.
[And] On the day divinity rejects the order.
They’ll bend the mirror back where at last
They’ll drag the whore through the sceptered isle.
They’ll break the grand design, to bring forth the healer.
On the day that never ends,
At Jornada del Muerto.
At this tilting plateau of diminishing grace,
Salvation is sought where the sun yields
No sanctuary.