Symphonic doom metal project A Dream Of Poe, founded in 2005 by Miguel Santos in Ponta Delgada (Azores, Portugal), have unveiled the first video single, "The Captivity Of Hesperus", taken from their forthcoming full‑length Katabasis: A Marriage Among Ashes, out on 24 April via Meuse Music Records.

Katabasis: A Marriage Among Ashes is an album born of descent—both lived and imagined. In starkly real terms, it emerged from personal catastrophe: a devastating fire that erased a home, a life, and the memories built within once‑safe walls, along with nearly all the music originally written for the record. From the ashes, only one song survived: "The Lament Of Phaethon". Everything else had to be rebuilt from nothing—ideas, instruments, songs, and identity alike. This enforced rebirth shaped not only the album's sound, but the very reason for its existence.

Conceptually, Katabasis: A Marriage Among Ashes mirrors this descent through a parallel mythic journey. Drawing on ancient Greek mythology, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and tragic cosmology, the album follows a frail and disillusioned figure—depicted variously as celestial bodies, a child, and a man and murderer—who seeks relief from suffering through a ritual descent into the underworld. What begins as a search for transcendence becomes an encounter with the absolute void: an inner wasteland of ash, solitude, fear, and unanswered prayers. Confronted with the inevitability of meaninglessness, the character ultimately surrenders, merging with the ashes in a final, violent union—a "marriage" sealed through destruction.

Threaded through these narratives is a unifying idea: union through collapse—union in destruction, fear, and suffering.

Yet while the concept embraces nihilism and the certainty of death, the album's creation stands in tension with that worldview. Katabasis: A Marriage Among Ashes exists because something was rebuilt where nothing should have remained. It is both an artistic descent into the void and a real‑world testament to survival—an album forged where loss and creation meet, and where ashes become the foundation for something new. Link