New Melechesh music!

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The new Melechesh song is great! It’s called “Grand Gathas of Baal Sin”, and you can stream it above. It has so much going on: thrashy black metal, tasty drum fills, those trademark Melechesh/reggaeton drum patterns, and, of course, Middle Eastern flavor. I love the diabolical trills and the slinky, clean-toned passage, which I wish would become an entire music genre.

Melechesh’s new album The Epigenesis comes out on October 1 in Europe and October 26 in North America. Despite its terrible artwork – it looks like if history and science textbooks from the ’80s had a baby – I haven’t been this excited about a new release in a while. More Middle Eastern flavor, please! Both in metal and in my stomach.

One thing that’s stoked my excitement is the series of making-of trailers that Nuclear Blast posted on YouTube. Earlier this year I wrung my hands about the label doing this for Immolation and compromising the band’s mystique. Since then, I’ve softened my stance as a result of analyzing my own reaction as a consumer of video trailer campaigns. The YouTube campaign for DJ Muggs and Ill Bill’s new record Kill Devil Hills had me practically frothing at the mouth to get the record. I wanted every crumb of anything I could see/hear about the record. That made me a rabid fan – and to a rabid fan, there is no such thing as overexposure.

It helps that the trailers for Melechesh are so hilariously bad that they only increase the band’s mystique. Cameras linger too long on boring shots, the visuals are blah, and the trailers leave one knowing even less about the album than before. (You can see all four so far below.) And there’s pretty much no way that Melechesh won’t have mystique: Netherlands by way of Israel; Sumerian, not Jewish; recorded new album in Turkey. That is the recipe for spicy falafel occult metal. Douse with hellish hot sauce and serve with invisible oranges!

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MAKING-OF TRAILERS FOR MELECHESH’S NEW ALBUM

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