“Tranquil Sleep Of The Dead, Eternal Seas Aflame” is the ravenous new song from Vancouver, British Columbia-based melodic death metal collective DUNGEON SERPENT. The track marks the latest preview of the band’s second album, Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms – their first record for Profound Lore Records – nearing release at the end of the month.
After five years of silence and meticulous work, DUNGEON SERPENT delivers Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms. Having already constructed a standout style of death metal with their World Of Sorrows debut, sharply focused upon fusing morbid and romantic strains of extreme metal from before metal’s turn-of-the-century involution, DUNGEON SERPENT now boldly looks to a future of their own creation and stretches their limbs to new horizons, breathing new life into the ruined world presented in the first album. Thus, Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms is a work of grand ambition and unbowed passion, not content to merely fine-tune and repeat what has already been done in a bygone age.
Yet with this expansion, DUNGEON SERPENT’s Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms presents a work united as a great whole. Each of the six pieces are tonally distinct but thematically bound and flow into a monolithic whole. With Arawn handling all vocals, guitars, keyboards, and bass, the vision is executed with greater clarity, enhanced skill, focus and the addition of new members to the horde, such as drummer Bhraonáin (Fake Dust). The music is now played with a speed and ferocity well beyond what was achieved on the first album, and the technique of the core instrumentation is more eclectic, drawing more freely from black metal, brutal death metal, and even as far as jazz and grind, as well as a sharper mix that allows elements such as agile basslines to be heard with much more clarity. The music cleanly flows between this ferocity and an almost cosmic sense of orchestral grandiosity, owing to the expanded instrumentation within the songs, chiefly mystical keyboards in the Hellenic tradition and violins provided by string player and contemporary composer Anju Singh (The Nausea), as well as many other adventurous atmospheric and textural flourishes.
Mixed and mastered by Damian Herring of Horrendous at his Subterranean Watchtower Studios (Blood Incantation, Ripped To Shreds, Sentient Horror), and completed with cover art by dark artist Marc Potts, Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms is a work that expresses both the untempered rawness and ferocity but also the latent musical potential within the truest essence of death metal in one breath, realized and entwined as extensions of one and the same principle.
Arawn reveals, “This is of a similar archetype to ‘Cosmic Sorcery’ from the first record. Slightly more ‘positive’ in tone and with more of a calm and repetitive structure in general. Despite this relative ‘positivity,’ the fixation on powerful and morbid death metal is maintained, with many more evil riffs pointing to such dark death metal cults as Immolation, Absu, and Maleficarum, and ends on an attempt at screamo style ‘whistle’ vocals for maximum intensity. The guitar solos on this one are courtesy of Brandon and Jeremy from one of my all-time favorite bands, Gyibaaw, and Shawn from the legendary horde Mitochondrion was kind enough to record acoustic guitars for the opening movement of this hymn.”
DUNGEON SERPENT’s “Tranquil Sleep Of The Dead, Eternal Seas Aflame” is now streaming everywhere HERE.
Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms will be released on LP, CD, and digital platforms on October 30th. Preoders for all formats and presaves are available now via Profound Lore HERE. Also watch the “Rainland’s Elegy” video HERE.
DUNGEON SERPENT:
Arawn – vocals, guitars, keyboards, bass
Bhraonain – drums
Nausea – violins
https://linktr.ee/DungeonSerpent
https://dungeonserpentmdm.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/dungeonserpent.official
https://profoundlorerecords.com
https://www.profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/profoundlorerecords
https://www.facebook.com/profoundlorerecords
https://x.com/profoundlore