At our site we’ve been enthusiastically following the progress of the Swiss band Voice of Ruin since 2014, which was when we hosted the first of two premieres we’ve done for them over that span of time — and now we’re adding a third one.
The occasion for this latest revelation of new music is the approach of the band’s fourth album, a record entitled Cold Epiphany that’s now set for release on December 1st. It follows by four years the band’s last full-length, Acheron, a record our review described as “melodic death metal’s melody mixed with thrash’s technicality and hardcore punk’s energy and punishing aggro beatdowns”.
As even that brief excerpt suggests, and as our review of Acheron explained in greater detail, the music of Voice of Ruin has always been difficult to classify, and the new album hasn’t made the task any easier. But the band’s willingness to pull from different stylistic wellsprings in different ways has also been a continuing source of their appeal.
That remains true on the new album, for reasons you can begin to appreciate through our premiere of a video for a song named “The Last Feast“.
On the new album Voice of Ruin drew their lyrical inspiration from both tragic reality and fiction, “from both the darkest episodes of history and an imaginary future, ravaged by disease and human madness”. With respect to the song we’re premiering today, they tell us:
“The Last Feast is clearly the most brutal song of our new record. We just wanted to write a banger and fast song with a catchy and melodic chorus. About the lyrics, The Last Feast is the condemned prisoner’s last meal in the death row.”
Sure enough, “The Last Feast” is a brutal musical beast, driven fast and hard by clobbering drumwork, thunderous bass lines, and a plethora of jolting, high-voltage riffs. It’s also a rabid animal, with the vocals ejecting the lyrics in maddened screams and the fretwork launching displays of feverish, darting delirium.
But like Cerberus, this song is a beast of many heads. In the midst of all the jackhammering punishment and violent delirium it spins out high swirling melodies that seem to channel despair. And the music also segues into a phase of grim gloom, along with a stricken melody that sounds pleading and forlorn.
And so the band aren’t content with getting a listener’s fast-twitch muscles firing, or inflicting a full-throttle, heavy-grooved beating, they also tug at the heartstrings.
The band have played hundreds of live shows over the course of their career, and the video vividly shows us what an electrifying experience their stage presence delivers.
We’ll also share Voice of Ruin‘s comments about the album as a whole:
“The writing process of this fourth album began at the end of 2020 and lasted until the end of last year. In fact we kept only 10 titles out of the 40 demos we had recorded. For the first time, our guitarist Nicolas took charge of production, recording and mixing and we are super happy with the result. Cold Epiphany is not a concept album but a blend of the best and heaviest music we have created over the last four years”.
As mentioned above, Cold Epiphany was produced, recorded, and mixed by VoR guitarist Nicolas Haerri at L12 Studio, and it was mastered by Mike Kalajian (Rogue Planet Mastering). The magnificently creepy cover art is the work of the legendary Travis Smith. The album is available for pre-order now.
PRE-ORDER:
https://voiceofruin.bandcamp.com/album/cold-epiphany
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