A long seven years after their last album (Nex Nihil), the Mexican black metal band Hacavitz are returning, with a tremendously powerful new album named Muerte that’s now set for release on February 9th by Vomit Records.
Muerte is the sixth full-length overall from Hacavitz in a career that now spans 20 years. Their name is well-known to devotees of dark metal, and their absence has been felt, even with a couple of splits dropping during the album gap.
But this new album abundantly compensates for the band’s absence, and you’ll quickly learn why when you watch and listen to our premiere of a lyric video for the album’s first song, “Muerte Primera“.
Photo by Juan Cabrera for Darkshot Photography
In a word, “Muerte Primera” is jaw-dropping. By the end of it, this writer’s jaw literally had dropped, and I think my mouth had been hanging open since the beginning, as if I’d witnessed in audio form the towering gates of Hell thrown open, to see first-hand all its horrors and hideous fascinations.
An excerpt from Mozart‘s “Kyrie Eleison” provides the grand orchestral and choral overture that begins this experience, and this is a case in which a metal band’s own music fully lives up to such an extravagant and momentous prelude.
The slow rumbling and booming impacts in the low end are titanic. The guitars are saturated in abrasive distortion as they whine and slither. The vocals sound like demons shape-shifted into wolves and brandishing fire. Suffering and illness spread through the music like a devastating plague.
As the song proceeds, the low end convulses in earthquakes, the guitars writhe and scream, but they glitter too, introducing a melody that sensually beckons but also sounds ill. The riffing uncoils and pulses above the rhythm section’s viscerally powerful beats.
Across the channels, the guitars continue to cavort, to groan, to quiver in agony or ecstasy or both. That seductive melody returns, like the pealing of warped bells. The voice howls the words in madness again, and screams in flames, with all chains cast off.
The song thus proves to be both abrasively dissonant and eerily melodic, immensely heavy and fiendishly spellbinding, as vicious as wolves and serpents on the attack but so captivating that it sticks in the head like a spike. And so by the end maybe other jaws will be left hanging open too.
In presenting its esoteric language the lyric video (by Ivan Vásquez – Voidwolf) makes striking use of the imagery in the attention-seizing cover art and other renderings of evil — the wolves, the serpents, the scorpion, a demonic eye casting its baleful gaze — enlightened by fire and shrouded in smoke. Credit for the art in the video goes to cover artist Antonio Nolasco, Daniel Corcuera, Brvja XIII, Flux Of Death, Dæcay Illustration and Voidwolf.
Muerte was recorded, mixed, and mastered by José Carlos Padilla at One Pot Music Studios in Querétaro, Qro, México. The Hacavitz lineup for the recording of this album was Antimo Buonanno (guitars, bass, vocals) and Cesar Sanchez (drums). The full official line-up of the band is:
Antimo Buonanno – Guitars & Vocals
César Sánchez – Drums
Fernando León – Guitars
Alan González – Bass
Muerte features guest appearances by Miguel Angel Victorino of SKULL MASK on the track “Tsontekotl Ika Tletl”, and additional drums and percussion in “Hiaretikos Nicte” by Alberto Vidal.
The album also include artworks by Brvja XIII, and there’s an alternate cover piece by Daniel Corcuera.
Vomit Records will release the new album in a Slipcase Digipack limited CD edition. Moribund Records will release the Digipack version for USA/Canada, and Vomit Records will handle the release in Latin America and the rest of the world.
For more info about Muerte, check the links below:
HACAVITZ:https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091126387866
VOMIT RECORDS:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089871565437
vomitrecords01@gmail.com