It wouldn’t be a big surprise if you found yourself a little perplexed by the High Fells video we’re about to present for a song called “Where They Call My Name“, which is off the band’s forthcoming debut album Catharsis.

On the one hand, the song itself is intense and powerful in many ways, serious music with visceral appeal, and in keeping with the album’s daunting but fascinating cover art created by Dawid Figiliek. On the other hand, the video takes some unexpected turns that radically diverge from the moods of the music… but we’ll come back to that in due course.

First, by way of background, High Fells are a relatively new blackened death metal unit from Denton, Texas. They starting getting things together during the first year of covid and then spent early 2021 writing the rest of that debut album, and they played their first show just a little under a year ago.

As they tell us, a lot of the lyrical concepts within Catharsis “focus around issues with mental illness, whether it be anxiety, depression, or past encounters in life that served as character building”. “Using this outlet,” they explain, “we’ve been able to express and cope with a lot of those lame feelings and avoid messing things up even more”. Continue reading »