(written by Islander)
Dreadlands is the debut album of the Italian band Stygian, which will be released on July 4th by Time To Kill Records. In its thematic conception and its lyrical expression, it reflects serious thought, scorching insight, and honest rage. Here is part of Stygian‘s preview of what the album is about:
Dreadlands explores the contrast between two spiritual worlds: the harmony-centered pagan traditions and the legacy of Abrahamic religions, which often channel humanity’s most violent instincts. While pagan rites served to express and contain primal forces, maintaining balance between humankind and nature, monotheistic dogmas have frequently justified war and destruction in the name of faith. This work stands as a tribute to life, to the sacred bond between people and the natural world — a bond shattered by centuries of religious conflict.
At the end of this article we’ll share more comments from Stygian about the album, including their statements about the meaning of each of the record’s 10 songs. In between here and there we’re also sharing a full stream of Dreadlands, which musically is itself an intersection or fusion of two worlds, a hybrid of crust punk and black metal. The music proves to be as fierce, as wounded, and as defiantly resilient as the album’s thematic insights.
Time To Kill recommends the album for fans of The Secret, This Gift Is A Curse, Wake, and Dödsrit. That’s a tantalizing appeal for people like us, because in our estimation those are four fantastic bands. It’s also an appeal that the music justifies. Here’s one further excerpt from Stygian‘s explanation of what inspired Dreadlands:
The album moves through a conflict between worldviews. In ancient traditions, violence was not hidden, it was structured, ritualized, part of a cycle that recognized the dark within the sacred. Modern religions claim to transcend violence, yet often preserve it beneath the surface, moralized, institutionalized, abstracted. This paradox defines our era: we pretend to have outgrown blood, but we continue to spill it. Each song is a confrontation, a rite, a fragment of resistance against erasure.
The first of these musical rites is indeed called “Death Rite,” described as “a vision of primal humanity, where survival, violence and ritual merge into one act. Power is taken, not granted and death becomes transformation.” In line with those thoughts, the song is violent and hard-charging. Propelled by head-hammering punk beats it immediately assaults listeners with riffing that’s brutally heavy and mercilessly cold but also seems to scream, and the words are ejected in raw screams themselves.
The song also includes frantic but also dismal tremolo’d riffing that creates a mood of desperation, with bursts of blast-beat drums, harrowing roars, and blazing chords amplifying the torment.
Undeniably ferocious, viscerally heavy and pulse-pounding, and channeling varying shades of emotional darkness, “Death Rite” is a vivid signal of what’s to come as Stygian continue to explore “the struggle between spirituality and imposed doctrine” and what humanity has lost in that struggle.
Like that opener, the following songs are compact, with only the tremendous closer reaching four minutes. Like that opener, they braid together punk gallops and buzzing guitars, bowel-loosening bass-lines, and vocals that are both scalding and monstrously cavernous. Stygian also continue displaying a talent for cooking up riffs that are melodic as well as cutting, and thus become channels (hook-laden channels) for a range of emotions.
Those moods cut across different territory even within individual songs, inspiring feelings of cruelty and disgust, of grief and despair, of fiery resilience and brazen rage, and of tragic grandeur. And in the vocal department they’ve kicked all the hinges off the door; you can imagine blood spraying the mic or humongous and haughty horrors invading your nightmares.
To keep the voltage high, Stygian also bring in sinew-triggering sequences, eruptions of defiantly jabbing riffage and neck-cracking or body-slugging beats that provoke reflexive responses, as well as brutish stomps that accomplish the same thing (“Falling God” being a prime example of that, but far from the only one).
What these blackened metalpunks don’t do is back off the intensity. Even in a song like “Burning Mires“, where the band dramatically slow the pace at first, initially strip down the music, and bring in the surprise of singing — all of which combine to create an air of despondency — soulful yet searing guitar solos and grimly slashing fretwork cut right to the quick. It really does sound, as the band explain, like a rendition of illusions collapsing, with “only regret and quiet rage” remaining.
That’s not the only song in which Stygian bring in gentle instrumentation and singing; they do it again in the ultimately shattering “Spirit in the Mist“. It’s also not the only song in which they stop rushing and start pulling listeners into an emotional ditch of one kind or another; the ebb and flow within songs and between them is part of what will keep people rooted in place as they make their way through Dreadlands. The same is true of their variations between greater and lesser degrees of punk, and greater and lesser degrees of metal.
It really is a relentlessly gripping and persistently head-hooking, head-moving, and soul-stirring album, and proof of keen songwriting chops as well as honed execution.
And with that, here’s the album stream (don’t forget that further down you’ll find more comments from the bands about these songs, which are well worth reading).
STYGIAN are :
Emiliano Melandri – Vocals
Mirko Abà – Guitar
Lucio Minghetti – Guitar
Paolo Parmeggiani Lopez – Bass
Rolando Giulio Ferro – Drums
Time To Kill will release Dreadlands on CD and digital formats, and, as noted earlier, they recommend it for fans of: The Secret, This Gift Is A Curse, Wake, and Dödsrit.
PRE-ORDER:
https://stygian-official.bandcamp.com/album/dreadlands
https://timetokillrecords.com/collections/stygian-dreadlands
STYGIAN:
https://www.facebook.com/stygianbhc
https://www.instagram.com/stygianbhc/
STYGIAN COMMENTARY
Dreadlands was born from a need to confront the contradictions at the core of what we call the sacred, the way we define violence, justify power and assign meaning to life and death. It is not a longing for the past, but a challenge to the present: a search for the instinctive truths that existed before language was shaped by doctrine.
The album moves through a conflict between worldviews. In ancient traditions, violence was not hidden, it was structured, ritualized, part of a cycle that recognized the dark within the sacred. Modern religions claim to transcend violence, yet often preserve it beneath the surface, moralized, institutionalized, abstracted. This paradox defines our era: we pretend to have outgrown blood, but we continue to spill it.
Each song is a confrontation, a rite, a fragment of resistance against erasure. Short, fierce and reflective, they inhabit a space where memory, decay and ancestral awareness still speak, if we choose to listen.
Track by Track:
1. Death Rite
A vision of primal humanity, where survival, violence and ritual merge into one act. Power is taken, not granted and death becomes transformation.
2. Endless Hunger
Nature reclaims its dominion through a once-human vessel, possessed by primal forces. Civilization is sacrificed in blood and decay, until only instinct and the will of the earth remain.
3. You Will Not Survive This Night
A cold embodiment of death as fate, indifferent, inevitable and absolute. The night becomes a threshold and no identity or intention can alter the outcome. Some are not meant to survive.
4. Runic Ritual
Ancient symbols twisted by those who seek power through fear. What was once a language of harmony and reverence becomes a mask for violence and delusion. The ritual collapses into madness, severed from its roots, echoing only in a ruined mind.
5. Burning Mires
The realization of a life wasted in service of the enemy, a system that enslaves without chains. As illusions collapse, only regret and quiet rage remain. In the end, he contemplates one final, desperate act, not to be saved, but to break free.
6. Shadow of a Massacre
An ancestral battlefield, where the old pagan world is betrayed by its own descendants, now servants of monotheistic faiths. History is rewritten, violence justified and those who traded truth for power are condemned to unrest. The shadow remains, fed by silence and denial.
7. Falling God
A frontal assault against imposed divinity. The sacred is desecrated, not for blasphemy, but to expose the blood beneath the myth. The god that ruled through fear is dragged down, not by doubt, but by rage.
8. Unholy Ways
A hymn to disobedience. From birth, the mind is shackled by dogma and fear. This track is a call to break the chain, to walk the unholy path, where freedom begins with refusal.
9. Spirit in the Mist
A reflection on guilt, memory and the impossibility of finding peace. The desecration of the past cannot be buried, the spirit walks through the fog, untouched by death, serving as a reminder that some wounds remain open.
10. Where Dead Men Stand
A battle for reason in a world still shaped by hidden dogmas. The protagonist stands where others have fallen, defending secular thought, ancestral memory and the right to live free from imposed faith. His ground is not holy, but human.
This is our stance, our offering. And if it stirs something in you, maybe that ancient bond with nature and instinct was never truly lost.