Lung Knots

Lung Knots' Blistering Sermon: Open Your "Void Hymnal" to Page Zero (Video Premiere)


For a certain type of music, the absolute last thing I want to know about is the creator—or really, anything related to it at all: as extreme music travels farther away from recognizable instruments and patterns, so too should any interpretations of it stray from recognizable humanity and the order we crave. I suppose it’s about mystery—if I can’t comprehend how the sounds I’m hearing came into existence, I’d prefer to keep it that way.

Lung Knots happens to cater to this particular quirk of mine: they spew forth pitch-black industrial bile behind a cloak of corrupted obscurity. Relying heavily on grating noise, slow throbbing rhythms, and apocalyptically-inspired atmosphere, there’s trace amounts of black metal discernable in their debut album Golden Dirges, Molten Larynges, but you’ll have to sift through layers of aural rust to find it. The music video for the opening track “Void Hymnal,” fittingly, rather than attempting a direct interpretation of the music, plays the same role as an old-school liquid light show: an artwork itself, meant to provide visual stimulation. But here, instead of mineral oils and water dancing on a projector screen, we have a barrage of imagery focused on rising pressure, manufacturing, and the act of wanton creation, all aimed at enhancing the music rather than attempting to somehow visualize five minutes of tortured screams and howling chaos. We’re premiering the video below: watch and be consumed.

Beyond the industrial machinations that occupy most of it, there’s flashes of something unsettlingly celestial in the video. As reverb-heavy drums pound out a ritualistic cadence, strange, horizontally mirrored patterns, interspersed between images of boiling smokestacks and cyclic machinery, start to seem less like random textures and more like the mouth of an ancient being commanding listeners to produce… something. This sense of dark reverence only builds in severity as choral pads float in towards the end of the song.

Of course, that’s not actually what the song is about, and probably not what the video is actually meant to convey. But it does, at least to me, and the abstract imagery has been curated and lashed together in a way that offers multiple interpretations and provides an additional layer of sensory intrigue to an already fascinating song.

From the band:

“Void Hymnal” is a song about the ingrained sickness and overwhelming aspect of pretense most people seem to dwell in and build their essence around to, keeping their mouths shut to avoid letting their often undesired thoughts to escape them, keeping themselves restricted mentally and physically despite having a strong tendency to inflict harm towards others or themselves one way or another. We like to think we’re alone with our unspoken burdens, even though those same ones weigh on the backs of every single one of us, dragging us down — we just keep them to ourselves. After all, once brought to light and publicly discussed, suddenly we aren’t unique anymore, and our turmoils lose the significance we give them, in order to assure ourselves that we’re having it worse than others. In a perverse fashion, we much rather stew in agony and distress than come clean and free ourselves to exist as we’re meant to.

Golden Dirges, Molten Larynges released on February 12th, 2021 via Trepanation Recordings and Total Dissonance Worship and can be purchased at the band’s Bandcamp page; additional vinyl stock is available through Tartarus Records.