(After a months’ long hiatus our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri has arisen again to write (as only he can) about a new album from the Egyptian black metal band Lycopolis, and many other wide-ranging subjects that the music led him into.)
Let’s play a game?
The adults running things are playing lots of games out there these days that started out as silly and became rather fucking terrifying of late.
Our game is simple.
Go to Bandcamp.
Type Sons of Set.
Play Eldest Son.
Try to sit still.
Fuckit, I’ll spare you the effort, here it is:
Verify human?
Success! You’re not a robot if you failed, though if you were absolutely comatose the past 117 seconds, please call a doctor.
As soon as I saw them pop up on my radar again, Lycopolis’s Sons of Set kept distracting the fuck out of me (I’m more than 4 months late on a few albums). If you are unfamiliar with the magi that are Lycopolis and their enchanting discography, they were covered before here.
Making an entrance with immediate urgency and import, a gravitas met not soon after by a guitar tone and melodic phrase most guitarists could only dream of, and after the pay-off riff finally and unequivocally shatters any low expectations, I was converted 400 times over already. There have been infectious as fuck compositions so far this year, but Lycopolis prodded the bar up quite a few notches with their bronzen khopesh swords on “Eldest Son.”
The second track, “He Who Is Below,” batters and broils with a hypnotic cadence more akin to a dance St. Vitus. We’re not in minimalist Glass territory, as the shuffling percussive incants and lyre-ian leads of delirium shake us out of our hook-deprived stupor. (Not a slight against Mr. Glass, who himself apparently did not enjoy the term minimalist. That link was to the visually stunning opera Akhnaten, and if you didn’t know, he released this sonomantic dream in 2024 in his 87th year!)
There is a way to fool the ear in having a track ascend indefinitely as demonstrated by Captain Pikant in deconstructing Darude’s ridiculously meme-able “Sandstorm” in this video on the history of the Roland 909 synthesizer. They show that the endlessly ascending snare roll in that tune is achieved by odd hits remaining at the same level, yet with even hits ever increasing in volume [if you hate synth music, at least just stay for the Stylophone rendition of thát “ear-piercing shrill alarm siren lead synth”, or the fact that the sandy Fin themselves commented on the video. Captain Pikant is one of the coolest pages on YouTube for electronic music transcription, even if you only like things metal, their videos are outstanding, and for electronic music basically the 21st century Alan W. Pollack… and that’s high praise indeed].
This technique is not necessarily what Lycopolis employ, though it does at times feel like they are doing something similar with their guitars as a sonic homage to the great stretches of time, sweat, and life’s blood it took skilled artisans to construct sepulchres that must have seemed in times of antiquity to have been like structures rising ad-infinitum. As the songs shut down with a stamp more final than the setting of The Great Pyramid of Khufu’s fucking colossal and incomprehensibly hefty benbenet (pyramidion or capstone of a pyramid, 8 meters are missing at the top of the Hellenized Cheops, not all of which are attributed to the pyramidion, but estimates of that ‘little’ missing tip are of it weighing as much as 1000 tons. Imagine that slapping down with a godhand), the start of each new track again sways and seduces with such salacious and not even halted fury that even mighty desert storms of dust could be abated.
When the rhythm section decides it is time to get the groove on, like in “Beyond the River’s” mid-section, I can’t see myself driving safely to this record. It commands 100% of my attention. With Sons of Set moreso even than any of their stellar output in the heretofore, Lycopolis has unconditionally and in unadulterated fashion bowed themselves at the throne of the mighty Egyptian-inflected riff.
“Mesektet” is the name of the solar barque that the sun god Ra used “to sail on the subterrestrial Nile [to] cross through the twelve gates” of the underworld at night, a journey upon which the deification of chaos, the serpent Apophis, had to be defeated each time in order to once again present the light of day. Commanding, rousing, cyclic, yet also serpentine; and dare I say, a victory over the sun. It plays as a perfect soundtrack to a battle as epic as any myth of old could attempt to sway its followers with.
“Fate and Destiny” picks up right where its predecessor left off, with vocals mixed in to sit just below the strings, for if they were any higher, they could positively freeze the blood. No words are needed to get your arse up off the floor. I didn’t believe in myths much prior to this, Sons of Set should have come with a warning label of “Not a Sơn Sette… Contains Djinn, not Gin, RUB AT OWN RISK!” (and… if anyone thought it tactless to add an originally Israeli band in an article about an Egyptian group, I believe that if Lycopolis ever do get to tour, the feelings would be reciprocal from both them and Melechesh to join powers; and false gods be damned, switching headlining duties as a trio between them and Cobalt? Goals)
The immense, unparalleled, and thankless work of the SCP Foundation has been a reference I’ve enjoyed employing. I’ll buy you a cup of tea, a coffee, or a beer if you ever run into me in the Red River Delta and you could unflinchingly convince me that what I’m about to share with you was not more engrossing than anything I’ve ever put to pen. For the uninitiated, Wikipedia did the legwork for ya: “SCP is an acronym for ‘Special Containment Procedures‘. The Foundation also has the backronym motto ‘Secure, Contain, Protect‘”.
“The SCP Foundation is a fictional organization featured in stories created by contributors on the SCP Wiki, a wiki-based collaborative writing project. Within the project’s shared fictional universe, the SCP Foundation is a secret organization that is responsible for capturing, containing, and studying various paranormal, supernatural, and other mysterious phenomena (known as “anomalies” or “SCPs”), while also keeping their existence hidden from the rest of society. The collaborative writing project includes elements of many genres such as horror, science fiction, and urban fantasy. The majority of works on the SCP Wiki consist of thousands of SCP files that mock confidential scientific reports and document various SCPs and associated containment procedures.
“The wiki’s literary works have been praised for their ability to convey horror through a quasi-scientific and academic writing style, as well as for their high standards of quality.”
In searching for a good analogy as to how supernaturally enthralled I’ve become with Sons of Set, I attempted looking for the highest classification of an SCP. Containment classes are less about how destructive they are but how difficult it is to actively contain them. This reddit thread is a good one if you like going down wormholes. It led me to my first encounter with SCP-3895. That is the article I’m referring to, you gotta click on “Our strength endures.”
It’s a great fucking read. Someone went full send cos it is one of the best ones I’ve experienced, and if you don’t have the superpower of visual ‘impairment’ like some of my best friends on this planet, it contains some easter eggs that are just so gratifying I don’t have to let the cipher spin on my screen, I know it’ll only die when the internet does.
Sons of Set, to paradoxize myself, contains within it an insuppressible supranatural zeal and fire. This is an esoteric Tiamat class supernatural entity in SCP Foundation terms, but if we remained true to our source material and read a bit further into Egyptology, we could find appropriate comparisons without having to delve into new world fiction. Packing more than a heck of a punch in concept, construction, and delivery, equating what it encapsulates with anything other than a form of elder magic would be heresy.
In Egyptian lore, Heka is the deification of magic, as well as medicine. Again, I have to quote in full from Wikipedia for being unable to improve on the original: “Heka magic is many things, but, above all, it has a close association with speech and the power of the word. In the realm of Egyptian magic, actions did not necessarily speak louder than words – they were often one and the same thing. Thought, deed, image, and power are theoretically united in the concept ofHeka. — O. Goelet (1994)”
Words, the arts, and everything that has intrinsic memetic and therefore infectious qualities are the most powerful magic we have and I could have asked the band to send me the lyrics, or bought the physical copy, however in choosing not to, it gives the reader the chance to explore for themselves the historical themes that these wolves decided to shed light on. One mythological text, held by many as a truth, starts with the following inscription, “In the beginning yodh created.” Another pretty famous one, in one of its numerous translations, reads as follows:
“The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
This song is attributed in the larger tome to a character named David and even from theological interpretations it is written from the perspective of a sheep. Why are you reading about Psalm 23? Cos I used the word ‘lyre’ earlier, looked up actual sounds of lyres being played, and having watched Peter Pringle’s stuff before, the man popped up. It’s relevant in sound as well as aesthetic cos, Pringle used a lyre that is purportedly replicated on the big Dave’s actual lyre from the city of Megiddo, you know, Armageddon.
And well, if you read a bit more into the subtext that kinda overtly points an objective reader to see that psalm 23 was written from the perception of sheep, that all that is necessary for salvation is to submit to its master herding it… and then Mr. Pringle playing #23 with the lyre of Megiddo. That’s prescient, that’s metal as fuck.
Which I mean, I had to go there and quote the great Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules from Pulp Fiction, written by Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary (it gets a bit kuffārish from hereon in, for lack of a word as antonym for ‘preachy’, but there are tunes sprinkled throughout):
“Jules: Well there’s this passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. ‘The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you. I been sayin’ that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never gave much thought what it meant. I just thought it was some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass. I saw some shit this mornin’ made me think twice. See now I’m thinkin’, maybe it means you’re the evil man. And I’m the righteous man. And Mr. 9 Milimeter here, he’s the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. Now I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’ real hard to be a shepherd.”
One of the oldest texts of the Abrahamic religions is that of the song of the sea found in Exodus 15 in modern day texts; it references a certain Moshe and his followers exalting in the favor of their weather/war god aiding them in defeating their enemies. Archeologically one of the oldest words we can find relating to the myths dominating the third rock from the sun is that of the silver Ketef Hinnom scrolls believed to be dated to around 600 BCE, so dated for the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple within which it was contained by the Babylonians in July of either 587 or 586 BCE.
The first line translated is the Tetragrammaton, the Ancient Hebrew-language theonym יהֹוָ֔ה , transliterated as YHWH. From its trifecta of theological research over the years it could be derived from a verb meaning something that was, is, causes to become, and will be. In Arabic it’s transliterated as يهوه and spells Jehovah, another way to enunciate the original abjad or consonantal text. But if you put it in the wrong way round in the translator you get this: ههي, which can read as “she is” to troglodytes like me.
Even though some people like to claim that ‘yhwh’ doesn’t exist in the youngest of the Abrahamic traditions, Islam; misconceptions usually stem from, for the lack of a better word, the ignorance of not having read, delved, or explored enough into the past. A disputed point regarding the Qur’an is of its origins as an oral text as opposed to a written text. Yahwistic offspring, dwellers of desert and the original vampires of time and memory as far as mythology is concerned, were polytheists and incorporated multitudes of deities and beliefs from surrounding cultures that have clear parallels in common era practices of appropriating pagan beliefs and systems, like the Easter and Christmas for instance.
Being acutely aware of each single word tapped onto this digital skrying machine, I’d like to bring your attention back to the notion of the power of words, who wields them, how, when, and where they are placed. It is not always about the oldest word, but that which is presented as such. To understand those that follow, and their zeal, one must understand the words they use and idolize. YHWH is a word beyond veneration, something reserved for only those conduits of divine wisdom, the priests, to utter within secret places. It is then out of respect that Islam, which some convincingly claim was more of an oral history, didn’t include it explicitly within its texts.
So, when the New Testament came around and the book of John, the first vaunted line of which according to one theologian, David A. Reed, had “a sordid past and a myriad of interpretations,” were written in at least 8 heretical translations, according to the man of sedge, as “and the Word was a god,” flying in the cerberic face of the holy trinity. Simply changing the article to ‘the’ was also heresy as the sects of Arianism and Sabellianism apparently wrote it. This verb was so sacred that people were not even allowed to utter it, hence all the variations over time of Elohim, etc.. Reminds one of that Egyptian god of magick a bit, no? They of Heka, predating the upstart desert pantheon amalgamation by nearly 2 millennia.
And what dominates a desert sky whether by day in its omnipotence – and presence – and even at night in its absence? “Far Strider” is a term honoring Horakhty, also known as “Horus of the two horizons,” the god of both the rising and setting sun, he who strides far to cross the sky. For a track honoring the greatest deity in the pantheon it runs at 0.7% of either the day or the night passage of the mesektet. If you speed it up to double-time on YouTube, then it’s run time is 2:39, and perhaps not what its creators envisioned, but closer to the number 24 of a full day, which makes it the first Arabic-scaled grind track that still shuts down a hard second before we’re met with the finale. Allusion or tetstament to the fickleness of human devotion or of the staying power of divinity?
Leading with arguably one of the strongest tracks could have been seen as a gamble; I sure got Barbary wool pulled over my eyes and bought Sons of Set purely so that Bandcamp could stop asking me if I wanted to break hearts in order to replay the first majestic 7 minutes and 19 seconds. The sun however does not set on trve Sons of Set, and how could an album anointing its makers as acolytes of the god of the red land, the desert, of foreigners, violence, storms, and disorder, be named as such if they did not give us a sign of their devotion?
In the study of Egyptian history, it is disputed whether Anubis, the god of the underworld and protector of graves was ever believed to be offspring of Set. Cases are more, apologies, set in stone for Sobek, a crocodilian deity with apotropaic powers of protection and warding off evil, as well as Maga, another reptilian that some could even see as a type of cipher in gaining clarity regarding the obscurities of intangible deities, demons, and how their amorphousness along concepts of good and evil could and have been altered or even politicized through regime change.
Lycopolis are a trio who choose to remain anonymous and it is fitting then that they chose Set’s altar to lay down their staffs or Was-sceptres at. Living in a country dominated by mythologies far younger and averse to sharing planes of existence with predecessors depicted as false gods, anonymity here is not a stylized choice, it’s whether one’s apostasy literally runs afoul of a death sentence.
“Year 400”, the closer, billows open its gates much in the same way as it languidly shudders to a close for having expended as much energy in the creation of this record with no uncertain allusion to a stela erected in commemoration of transitions in the mythology of Set; how else could one do justice to what has come before other than allowing the susurrations of wind-sprung desert sands swirling this true testament to artistic prowess, the vitalism of African metal and our ears to much needed rest?
This record and these magi from the global South refuse to sign their statement with a meek whimper. Roiling and tumultuous, martial and magisterial, at first it seemed that there be an ingredient less prominent in the final chapter, but as I played it over and over the opacity of my sonic comprehension morphed, gave back to even the infidel’s visage the stolen eye of Horus to see that eclipsed in the minutiae of sonic inflections and even supraliminal account of transition, there is always a terminus, in passing from one to the other, there is always strife and there is a death, however big or small it may seem. And in death there is a required contemplation that “Year 400” not subtly but emphatically asks us to find pause in.
Sons of Set marks a triumphant return of the wolf gods of Lycopolis and the best $6.66 I spent all year.
Lycopolis are: The Wolf Gods, Sons of Set.
Physical release available at: Kunaki
https://www.instagram.com/lycopolisband/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/5WtrULKuHsXM5xB8oW3vX8
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/lycopolis/1761805048