One of Australia's longest-running and most respected black metal bands, Pestilential Shadows, has set 5 September as the release date for its new album, Wretch, which will arrive via Northern Silence and Brilliant Emperor.
Pestilential Shadows has been building a towering canon of work since 2003. The shadowy collective, led by founding vocalist and guitarist Balam, consistently creates compelling swathes of drama and darkness, all-enveloping emotion, and regal yet gritty grandeur.
Wretch follows from last year's Devil's Hammer and continues the band's progression/regression toward uglier, gnarlier expanses. Mind you, it's a lateral development rather than a vertical one - the "form" is still black metal, and its attendant contents are ruminations on death and the beyond - but the fact that Pestilential Shadows can subtly-to-significantly shift its sonic palette whilst conveying its characteristic melancholy and tragedy speaks to the enduring strength of its songwriting. What's more, the album's production is palpably professional, feeling effervescent and crisp even when running through those uglier, gnarlier expanses. If anything, said recording style of Wretch, mastered by Krvna mainman Krvna Vatra, who played on the aforementioned Devil's Hammer, with mixing done by Balam, gives the record a uniquely ethereal aspect, even when the band has kicked into ultraviolent overdrive. Above all, the eight songs that comprise the 49-minute Wretch prove Pestilential Shadows as masters of pacing, doling out the sublime and the profane with equally windswept aplomb. Of special note is the solemn procession of "Where Sunlight Goes To Die", the first revealed upcoming Wretch track, which features guest choral vocals from Dis Pater of Midnight Odyssey.
As always, totality is key, and thus Greallach Art has been brought back to provide stark and austere cover artwork for Wretch. On the strength of this album alone, Pestilential Shadows continues to assert its position as a classics-minded black metal vanguard and will cement that position in the flesh with a European tour slated for late August through September, followed by an Australian/New Zealand tour in October (the dates are below). Link
Wretch tracklist:
1. Wretch
2. Erebus Divination
3. Despondent
4. Death-Knell
5. Where Sunlight Goes To Die
6. Aherbelts
7. Cold Entropy
8. Embraced By The Spirit-Realm
Pestilential Shadows - current tour dates:
30 Aug - Northern Silence Festival - Germany
01 Sep - Warsaw
03 Sep - Prague
05 Sep - Mörlenbach
06 Sep - Aarburg
09 Sep - Vienna
12 Sep - Paris
13 Sep - Brussels
16 Sep - Tilburg
20 Sep - Wroclaw
09 Oct - Sydney
10 Oct - Wellington
11 Oct - Auckland
23 Oct - Melbourne
24 Oct - Adelaide
25 Oct - Brisbane
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"I like to call our music suicide pop, because our songs are pretty easy to listen to, but the topics are very negative and quite dark. It's pop, but negative pop." - Simone Salvatori
"It's about humans; we are the high parasites. We feast on the earth and on all the things that the earth gives us. We don't just take a little bit, we take everything." - Aaron Stainthorpe
"For my sake, I could just stop playing the old stuff, but on the other hand, I know that our fans want it." - Anders Kobro
"I think it's basically a mutation of a lot of different things — like a hybrid creature nobody quite knows how to categorise. A heretic, I guess." - Håvard Ellefsen (Mortiis)
