(written by Islander)
This year the Croatian black/death metal band Defiant will commemorate their 20th year of existence with the release of their fifth album Mammon Mantra. It’s set for discharge by Satanath Records (Georgia) and InsArt Records (UK) on May 17th, and to help pave the way we’re premiering a blaspheming lyric video for the album track “Lord of the Opening“.
Mammon Mantra follows the band’s last album Insurrection Icon by about seven years, though the band helped fill that long gap with the Ways ov Damnation split with DVVAD in late 2020 and the Vanguards of Misrule EP in 2022.
The new album is described as “the closest thing that the band ever came to a concept album; it explores man’s darkest desires and corruption ever since this creature stood on its two feet, from the dawn of time to the current events.”
The song you’re about to discover is definitely a dark and devastating creation, well-suited to our current age of damnation, but it’s also a multi-faceted head-spinner of a high order. And, it features guest vocals by Tony “Demolition Man” Dolan from Venom Inc./Atomkraft.
This new song’s overture slowly rings, and its reverberating notes deliver dismal grief, as if manifesting a wrenching and hopeless dismay over all the innumerable wrongs of humankind. But as you’ll soon discover, the music also delivers a burning rage.
The band discharge their blasphemous fury through bursts of obliterating drums, vicious flurries of barbed-wire riffage, and vocals that howl, roar, and scream to the heavens, interspersed with groaning chords and methodically cracking beats and backed by notable bass rumbles.
As the song proceeds, it reveals increasingly elaborate and unexpected nuances, many of which involve intriguing bass-and-drum interplay in softer phases, as well as incendiary instrumental and vocal firestorms in which voices yell and scream, the fretwork frantically roils, and the drums go wild.
Grief also revisits the song through a wailing, clear-toned guitar solo, which also links arms with the rhythm section’s well-demonstrated progginess. That’s followed by an exhilarating display of intricate instrumental pyrotechnics.
And so, the song does feed the need for being scorched to the bone and battered to the ground, but it also incorporates almost dream-like prog-metal digressions as well as inventive and technically impressive escapades that set the mind spinning.
DEFIANT is:
Kris – guitars
T. Kuternik – vocals
Julijana – bass
Dominik – drums
GUESTS:
Insanus – additional percussion
Maksymina “Maxi” Kuzianik – vocals (track 4)
Tony Dolan – vocals (track 7)
Satanath and InsArt will release Mammon Mantra in a jewel-box CD edition with a 12-page booklet (300 copies), and as a digital download. Below you’ll find useful links, and a stream of the first song released from the album, “Ostara’s Eve“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://satanath.bandcamp.com/album/sat391-defiant-mammon-mantra-2025
https://insartrecords.bandcamp.com/
DEFIANT:
https://defiantcro.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/defiant.croatia
https://www.instagram.com/defiant.official