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Baroque-influenced, post-black metal duo Mortal Thrall will release its debut full-length, A Path To Fire, on 20 May via Trepanation Recordings. In advance of the record's release, the band has only recently unveiled the album's title track, "A Path To Fire", available in the player below.
Todd Harris (guitar, bass, vocals, composition, lyrics) comments: "The track sets the stage for the story that unfolds within the album. It gives a snapshot of the album's subject, Maria -- one of the last victims of the Spanish Inquisition -- and her early life, while at the same time foreshadowing her ultimate fate".
Mortal Thrall was forged in September 2020 by vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Todd Harris (ex-Oubliette, Battle Path) with Christopher Scott Davis (synth, keyboards). Spontaneously conceptualized, written, and recorded over lockdown, A Path To Fire is an emotive fresco of intertwining guitar lines, stunning chord progressions, passionate vocals, textural synth, and martial drumming which evolved from Harris' obsession with Renaissance paintings.
Thematically set in the last days of the Spanish Inquisition, the album tells the story of one of the final victims - Maria de los Dolores Lopez - murdered by the church for "heresy" and whose story was buried by the Vatican until the early 1990s. Harris felt compelled to pay tribute to her horrendous fate, seeing disturbing parallels in the still-pervading influence and authority of religious power in the modern world which has been a personal point of contention throughout his life as a gay man.
Notes Harris, "Considering the hell she was put through, she was an absolute pillar of strength in the face of such extreme adversity. It paralleled for me many of the same things that women, people of color, and the LGBTQIA+ community deal with today. She was courageous and outspoken in a very dangerous period and refused to be silenced in her beliefs, even though they were highly unorthodox. I'll let the lyrics fill in the details, but I hope this album will resonate for anyone who feels beat down by society". Link
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