(written by Islander)
Last summer we had the pleasure of premiering and reviewing Dreadlands, the debut album from Ravenna-based Stygian. As we wrote then, the music was “an intersection or fusion of two worlds, a hybrid of crust punk and black metal” that proved to be “as fierce, as wounded, and as defiantly resilient as the album’s thematic insights”.
As for those thematic insights, they reflected “serious thought, scorching insight, and honest rage”. To quote the band:
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.
Now we return to Stygian with our premiere of the title song from a new two-track EP named Hunt the Divine, which the band will release on September 4th. We have received this description of the new EP:
“Hunt the Divine explores the rejection of religious authority and the power built around dogma. From the symbolic hunt for the divine in “Hunt the Divine” to the confrontation between divine word and human consciousness in “Verba Homini“, the two tracks portray a conflict between imposed faith and self-determination through violent, ancestral and deliberately allegorical imagery.”
In both of these new songs the lyrics are indeed enraged and violent, and in both they are directed against post-pagan religious dogmas and authorities. The lyrics of the title song imagine an ancestral narrator hunting for a claimed divinity, a hunter seeking to erase injustice and feast on the flesh of his prey in “the darkness broken by the moon”.
The ferocity of the song’s vocals matches the fury in the words; they eject the lyrics in the kind of savage howls and livid screams that spawn images of claws extended and teeth bared. The music rages as well, but it’s a grim, bitter, and coldly predatory kind of anger, very much like the soundtrack to a determined and murderous hunt through an ominous moon-lit forest (something also imagined in the EP’s cover art). But we should emphasize that the music is also a channel of deep sorrow and regret for what has already been lost to the hunter’s fleeing prey.
The song opens with a stalking pace and jagged reverberations that are bleak and frightening in their mood. The drums begin to more heavily pound, and then they explode in a torrent of blast-beats just as the vocals arrive and the riffing begins to swarm (while still carrying forward that grim opening melody).
The rhythm section shift into a rocking cadence as the riffing both sizzles and throbs. The whirring lead guitar seems to wail in grief, and the riffing moans and groans but also heavily throbs again, like the coursing of blood through a surging heart. When the band slow the pace again, the feverishly flickering lead guitar and those bleak abrasive notes deepen the song’s feeling of soul-sinking grief (though the vocals keep the fury at the forefront too).
It’s a dark and unsettling song with a lot of visceral power, and a very memorable one too.
STYGIAN:
Emiliano Melandri – Vocals
Mirko Abà – Guitar
Lucio Minghetti – Guitar
Paolo Parmeggiani Lopez – Bass
Rolando Giulio Ferro – Drums
For more information about Stygian and the new EP, check the locations linked below.
https://www.facebook.com/stygianbhc
https://www.instagram.com/stygianbhc
https://open.spotify.com/artist/5MVTPxaw9v1aboMm7O6FVV