Photo by Mike Wandy
“The music seems to whine and scream, bludgeon and blare, moan and decay, and the rhythm section’s own idiosyncratic maneuvers significantly add to the music’s mentally un-balancing and anxiety-inducing effects (as does the continuing tandem of cold-hearted gutturals and berserk shrieks).” – No Clean Singing
“Devourer Of All Graveyards” is the latest single from blackened death/doom conjurors WITHERER. Now playing courtesy of No Clean Singing, the track comes off the band’s debut full-length, Shadow Without A Horizon, set for release on June 20th via Hypaethral Records.
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.
Offers the band on “Devourer of All Graveyards,” “The very caverns below one’s feet are the cathedral halls of specters and ghosts. The shadows aeons-long that stretch throughout the earth’s veins are awoken and traversed. Plummeting into the lithic corridors below, ‘Devourer Of All Graveyards’ evokes the tense horror of death and the slow process of decay, the transformation of vigorous flesh and bone downwards through the grave into the motionless dark of stone and soil.”
Adds No Clean Singing in part, “…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…”
Stream WITHERER’s “Devourer Of All Graveyards” at THIS LOCATION.
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 where the band’s previously release single, “Solar Collapse Mandala,” can be streamed.
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 as part of various well-known bands, these pseudonymous musicians shed the skin of previous identities to completely submerge themselves within this project’s depressive gloom. 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.”
WITHERER:
Tiamoath – vocals, guitars, bass, songwriting, keyboards, bells
Øhrracle – vocals, guitars
Hex Visceræ – drum
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