The Texas duo Pneuma Hagion made an inspired choice of artwork for the cover of their forthcoming third album, From Beyond: It is William Blake’s 1795 drawing The House of Death, which was inspired by lines from Book XI of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the archangel Michael reveals to Adam in terrible detail the doomed fate of humans — a description of a “Lazar-house” filled with afflicted people suffering in their agonies, “and over them triumphant Death his Dart Shook….”
Pneuma Hagion‘s new album, which is set for release on August 30th by Everlasting Spew Records, conjures terrible images of its own:
“From Beyond explores Lovecraftian ideas of horrifying extra-dimensional entities forcing their way into the causal universe by infecting the minds of humans.
“Each song is from the perspective of some malevolent entity of unfathomable nature trying to influence the world of mortals and trying to infiltrate our universe in order to cause its ultimate destruction.”
Conceptually, From Beyond thus seems to be roughly in line with the thematic inspirations of Pneuma Hagion‘s first two albums. Those two, Voidgazer (2020) and Demiurge (2022), drew upon aspects of Gnostic cosmology as metaphors for the idea that man is a creature of spirit imprisoned in a universe dominated by cruelty and evil, fated to struggle against the incarnate, corporeal misery of his earthly existence. They too were adorned by the artwork of William Blake.
Lovecraftian imagery was no stranger to those albums either, and from what we’ve quoted above, HP’s visions seem to play a more central role in Pneuma Hagion‘s new musical renderings of horror and doom. And make no mistake, that is what these songs are.
That won’t come as a shock to people who’ve heard the first two albums, but even people such as those are likely to be taken aback by just how brutally harrowing the new album is. A sign of that comes today through our premiere of From Beyond‘s opening track, “Harbinger of Dissolution“.
The music strikes hard and fast, discharging an obliterating but electrifying percussive barrage and a dense, roiling mass of fretwork derangement, punctuated with vicious jabs.
Monstrous roars rise up from abyssal depths as the riffing churns, jolts, and shrieks, tuned to maximum levels of toxicity. Warped strings dismally moan and wail, providing a bridge to a second and less maniacal but more oppressive phase of the song, one in which the high-octane percussive weaponry slows and the chords lurch and pound — but the guitar still squeals in agony, and the vocals are still an abomination given voice.
In the song’s final phase, madness and malignancy reign again in cruel frenzies segmented by bursts of jackhammering sonic trauma.
Harrowing and heartless music, to be sure, but viscerally powerful, a ruthless rendering of ravaging terrors… from beyond….
From Beyond was mixed and mastered by Mike G., with vinyl mastering by Carlo Altobelli at Toxic Basement Studios.
Everlasting Spew will release the album in August on CD, cassette tape, and digital formats, and a vinyl edition will be released in the coming autumn. It’s recommended for fans of Morbid Angel, Immolation, Hissing, and Antediluvian.
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