Paolo Girardi somehow managed to reach new heights of horror when he painted the cover art for Lurk‘s new album Aegis. With astonishing detail he created a nightmare vision of a dragon made of macabre creatures emerging from the maw of an equally hideous monster (from which a waterfall of wraiths and demons descends), swooping down toward a graveyard of risen dead.
It’s a fitting presentation for an album that is itself an experience in dread and revulsion, panic and despondency, one that creates harrowing otherworldly visions and inflicts immense traumatizing brutality. Paradoxically, Lurk also succeed in making their blood-freezing and bone-smashing musical excursions spellbinding. They describe their own conceptions this way:
“Aegis embodies the power of discord feeding the individual. The songs roll out in sporadic forms of different persons, under the guidance of furor and perseverance. Those stem from all things which are against divinity. No void too deep or mind too obscure, no action too human.”
The album is still fairly far away, with a release date of April 7th set by Transcending Obscurity Records, but there are already tangible reasons to get greedy for it, with a couple of songs already sprung from the crypt and one more we’re presenting today. This new one is named “The Blooming“. Continue reading »
