Italian black metal band Darkend has announced its fifth studio album, Viaticum, to be released on 14 June through recently signed with Time To Kill Records. The band has also presented the first upcoming album's single and video, "An Ancient Plague Has Silently Worn Our Garments As Its Throne".

Viaticum flows out from the sacred spaciousness beyond duality, enshrouding its silent nature with the voice of ancient ceremonial chants, dungeon synth ambience and sulphur riffs engraved on arcane metal patterns. Combining shades that span from Mercyful Fate to Dissection ("An Incautious Exhumation Of What Lies Beneath Forgotten Ground") and from Dead Can Dance ("In Your Multitude") to Arvo Pärt ("In My Multitude"), the album enlightens an immersive and cathartic pathway towards the deepest hidden fields of who we are.

The band commented: "The Light of Consciousness shines on a recurrent form of spiritual pestilence, contaminating the inner world and, consequentially, every shape inhabiting the outer world. When illuminated, what once operated as a form of destroying sickness mutates into a propulsive stream of elevating energy. 'An Ancient Plague Has Silently Worn Our Garments As Its Throne' is a haunting picturization of this process. A covenant between suffocating darkness and the radiant gleams of its sublimation, melted in a hypnotic continuum of incorporeal tension. With lyrics and vocal lines, courtesy of Animæ, the core riffs of the song has been penned by Nothingness before him and the band parted ways, while the blazing guitar solo and the harmonized melodic guitars in the middle section serve as an introduction to our new guitarist Acamar. As a circle completes, Darkend would like to dedicate this first single out of Viaticum to Nothingness himself: to his memory and to his legacy".

Darkend is the band fronted by Animae (also the guest vocalist for Gaahl's Wyrd on various European festivals and venues). After rather humble beginnings mostly inspired by orchestral extreme metal, Darkend developed a quite peculiar artistic style blending black metal patterns, ritual ambience, dark classic metal riffs and solos in the vein of Mercyful Fate, Angel Witch, and a ritualistic, hypnotic vibe explicitly created to generate a deep sonic and spiritual transcendence.

Having toured Europe thrice alongside Cradle Of Filth, Rotting Christ, Samael, Melechesh and Keep Of Kalessin, the band had the privilege to collaborate with some of the most renowned artists of the scene while Attila Csihar (Mayhem), Niklas Kvarforth (Shining) and Sakis Tolis (Rotting Christ) offered their voices for The Canticle Of Shadows (2016, Non Serviam Records), the profound friendship between Gaahl and Animae bloomed a breathtaking collaboration with Wardruna's Lindy-Fay Hella immortalized on the album Spiritual Resonance (2019, Dark Essence Records). Link

Viaticum tracklist:
01. In My Multitude
02. An Incautious Exhumation Of What Lies Beneath Forgotten Ground
03. De Masticatione Mortuorum In Tumulis
04. An Ancient Plague Has Silently Worn Our Garments As Its Throne
05. In Your Multitude