Photo by Mike Wandy
“Standing tall and domineering at 53 minutes across five tracks, this LP slithers through speakers and coils up as soundscapes are built by dense and suffocating ambiance, the kind you can only imagine as moonlit and lonesome, vaguely dangerous and foreboding.” – Everything Is Noise
Everything Is Noise is currently streaming Shadow Without A Horizon, the debut full-length from blackened death/doom practitioners WITHERER. The premiere comes in advance of the record’s official unveiling Friday, June 20th via Hypaethral Records.
Weaving together black/death intensity and vast funeral doom ritualism, WITHERER crafts soundscapes both punishing and dreamlike, claustrophobic and immense, ruthless and meditative. Veterans of the black and death metal genres, these pseudonymous musicians shed the skin of previous identities to completely submerge themselves within this project’s depressive gloom. On Shadow Without A Horizon, the vile depths and dragging slowness of funeral doom are punctuated by throttling chaos; churning violence gives way to airy, spectral passages, and mournful ambience is sliced through with feverish convulsions in a truly distinctive approach to blackened death/doom.
Writes Everything Is Noise, “Fans of Bell Witch and Spectral Voice will wanna click play immediately, but even those two massive comparisons don’t prepare you for the entire breadth of music WITHERER plunder from the crust of the earth. Funereal at its core, the trio contends with world-ending measures built on cloaked guitars, pounding drums, and gurgling vocals forming tales of unknowable destruction.”
Stream WITHERER’s Shadow Without A Horizon, exclusively at Everything Is Noise, HERE.
WITHERER’s Shadow Without A Horizon features artwork, layout, and photo editing by Danille Gauvin and includes guest voice and guitar by T. G. on “Praises” and additional vocals by M. Adem on “Devourer Of All Graveyards” and “Solar Collapse Mandala.”
The record was recorded by Roland Rodas at Cavern Of Echoes Studios and Matt Hems at Seventh Level Sound except “The Wailing Hours (Plummeting Under The Tunnels)” which was recorded and produced by Cameron O’Neill. M. Adem’s vocals were engineered and produced by Raphael Weinroth-Browne. Mixing and mastering was handled by Rodas (also at Cavern Of Echoes Studios).
Shadow Without A Horizon will be released on CD (ltd. 300) and digital formats as well as 2xLP (100 on Subterranean Blue vinyl and 200 on Black vinyl).
Find physical orders at the Hypaethral webshop HERE and digital orders at Bandcamp HERE.
Following an unreleased demo and the 2019 single “Milk Sea (Bathing In Its Waves),” WITHERER entered a multi-year phase of songwriting for its first full-length album, Shadow Without A Horizon. This produced a greater compositional focus on doom metal, leading to a reformulation of the band’s earlier atmospheric black metal sound into the blackened death/doom monstrosity it has emerged as today. The band also transformed from a one-man project into a three piece, as founding musician and lead songwriter/lyricist Tiamoath was joined by guitarist Øhrracle and drummer Hex Visceræ.
Shadow Without A Horizon slices through genre conventions and plummets into the furthest subterranean corners of the earth’s bloodless veins. Different confrontations with mortality amongst all three members during the writing and recording process of the record created an alchemical intensity to the performances. “I had already described the album as an hour-long memento mori,” Tiamoath explains. “The fact that health issues and brushes with death occurred during the process of creating this release was certainly difficult, but it was conducive to the theme of Shadow Without A Horizon. I think it’s a recording that will stick with us all because of that and was profoundly cathartic as a result.”
“…like the void of a black hole, and once sucked inside one, these are the sounds I would expect to hear…the sounds of torture, and, ultimately, death.” – Metal Temple
“Shadow Without a Horizon is five tracks clocking in at almost an agonizing hour with three of the tracks going well over the ten minute mark. Plenty of time to burn down that blunt or cry your feelings out
because Sally from gym class wasn’t impressed with your Euronymous shower sandals. If you dig what Thantifaxath are doing or wish Primitive Man came from a colder climate, Witherer are right up your depressed alley!” – Jersey Beat
“…the music… effectively draws a daunting connection between the blackness of the earth’s own devouring veins and the gaping abyssal regions of the cosmos above. The song’s opening phase of black/death is an elaborate turmoil, an eye-popping amalgam of rapidly roiling and writhing riffage that’s scathing in tone, vividly somersaulting drums, spectral but delirious leads, scorching howls, and monstrous roars. The music is heavy and frenzied, cutting and gutting, heartless and cruel — and the riffing will burrow into listeners’ skulls like a turbocharged tunneling machine…” – No Clean Singing on “Devourer Of All Graveyards”
WITHERER:
Tiamoath – vocals, guitars, bass, songwriting, keyboards, bells
Øhrracle – vocals, guitars
Hex Visceræ – drum
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