(written by Islander)
For nearly a decade we’ve been recommending the recordings of the Brisbane-based black metal band Graveir, and we’re doing it again today. Their discography to date has included a pair of albums — Iconostasis (2016) and King of the Silent World (2020) — plus an EP and a pair of splits. And now they have a third album named The Festering Triad that’s set for release on May 29th by Apocalyptic Witchcraft Recordings.
As their label has accurately described, Graveir’s music has proven to be “bleak, violent and uncompromising.” It’s capable of evoking fury, chaos, and degradation, but also creating mind-warping melodic visions that are unearthly and even mesmerizing but also profoundly frightening. And here is how Apocalyptic Witchcraft describes their new full-length:
The Festering Triad, their third album, is a bleak vision of societal decay and corrupted power. Across eight tracks, bile-fuelled aggression surges through anxiety-ridden drums, convulsing guitars, and serpentine basslines—forming a suffocating, venomous descent into rot.
What we have for you today is a startling sign of just how accurate that description is, a song named “A Futile Exhortation“, which arrives with a tremendous video that captures many of the album’s dire concepts.
Although the vocals throughout “A Futile Exhortation” are a scalding and scarring expulsion of fury, the music continually changes and channels different moods as it does, though all of them are dark and dire.
At the outset Graveir immediately hurl listeners into a maelstrom, inflicting bone-smashing blast-beats, magma-like bass-lines, and dense riffing that maniacally sears and writhes. As the drums shift into steadier beats and the bass seems to moodily muse, the riffing begins to sound both more venomous and more desperate (and even miserable).
The riffing also shifts further downward in range, creating an even more oppressive and hopeless mood, and yet it begins to boil and burn again as the vocals go wild and the drums resume their furious hammering. The shifts continue, interspersed with electric drum-fills and big bass pulsations, whipping the moods between episodes that are fiery, maliciously frenzied, and fraught with agony.
As for the video you’re about to see, it was directed by Clint Lewis and includes performances by Nathan Glover as The Rapacious King and Heaven Arici as the personification of Greed. We’ve received this introduction to what you’ll witness:
The video for A Futile Exhortation fits very thematically with the lyrics and the concept of the album. It depicts the self-destructive nature of greed through the afflicted Rapacious King, whose submission to unfettered greed leads to his destruction until in the end only greed remains.
Greed cares not for tomorrow, or sustaining. It is ever hungry and only seeks to devour and once it has devoured everything else it will take the last thing left – the self.
We also want to share the comments of Graveir and director Clint Lewis about the video:
The band would like to thank Clint from Red Tape Pictures for helping to realise the vision and making the shoot thoroughly enjoyable. He understood the brief well and his input helped shape it into the end result which we feel makes for a distinct visual experience. Also thanks to Heaven for being game to try anything and everything to help portray greed as equally beguiling and terrifying in equal measure.
From director Clint Lewis (@redtapepictures):
Graveir’s music already carries so much weight and aggression that the challenge is to match it without diluting it. The themes of greed and corruption that the band pitched already lean into some pretty interesting visual directions. Telling that story symbolically with obscured and fragmented shots of the band hopefully leaves viewers with something unsettling that sticks after the video ends.
GRAVEIR:
Gloom – Vocals
Vvoid – Guitar
Snjór – Guitar
Pandora – Bass
XI – Drums
Apocalyptic Witchcraft will release The Festering Triad on vinyl LP, CD, and digital formats. Find pre-orders via the links below, and also lend your eyes and ears to the previously released lyric video for another album track, “A Thief in the Heart of Man“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://orcd.co/APW061
https://graveircult.bandcamp.com/album/the-festering-triad-2
GRAVEIR:
https://www.graveircult.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Graveirbm/
https://www.instagram.com/graveircult/