Thrall Goes ‘Within the Furnace of Fear’ on “Hollow” (Early Track Stream)
Metal, in both name and approach, evokes mechanical chaos. In its more successful moments, listening to bands like Australia's Thrall can make a listener feel trapped like a cog in some giant apparatus, wheels and cams grinding together in a deadly, unstoppable dance. On their forthcoming album, Thrall work the levers of their instruments to create a machine that appears different from different angles. Over 43 minutes, Schisms, out May 28 on vinyl via Impure Sounds and cassette via Brilliant Emperor, smashes through genres on its way to total eardrum annihilation.
It's been almost ten years since Thrall's last LP, Aokigahara Jukai, and nearly seven since their last release. This gap is obvious in positive ways—while capable of weaving a sonic spell on older tracks such as "The Pact," their new LP Schisms benefits from refinements in both songwriting and production.
The album sees the four-piece seamlessly weld thrash, black and doom pieces to create a blackened killdozer. Boasting a recording lineup that features members of Gatecreeper, Noose Rot, Förfalla, and others, Thrall forgo atmosphere in favor of different shades of fear. Even the doomier moments never relax into despair; the entire affair is undercut with a sense of building panic. Chords linger, waiting for the next riff. Blast beats end abruptly, waiting for the next ripple of drums from the deep.
The four-piece's ability to conjure dread is on full display on new track "Hollow," debuting here. It embodies what many of the album's other songs do well, marshaling the full forces of black metal before strategic, doomed-out pauses let the listener recoil.
Stream the full track early below.
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Member Tøm Vøid has this to say about "Hollow":
I prefer to let listeners bring their own interpretations to my lyrics and music. "Hollow" appropriates elements of a poem and builds a new narrative exploring recurrent themes and motifs for the band. These include Anthropocene nihilism, the desert as an inexorable force of nature, religion as shackles of belief, false hope, a horrific universe where no life prevails, the entropy of civilisations, the boundary between sentience and corporeality. I wanted the opening riff to sound like a swarm of locusts and move through desolation to tension, release, and return to tension.
Lyrics for "Hollow":
Beneath altars of desecrated dreams
Hollow beings summon the storm
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the shadow
Between the dream
And the silence
Falls the shadow
Boundless dunes subsume
And grind their cities to dust
Their prayers are sand in a desert - fallow
Their dreams of paradise beyond - hollow
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the shadow
Between the dream
And the silence
Falls the shadow
Their prayers are sand in a desert - fallow
Their dreams of paradise beyond - hollow
Beneath altars of desecrated dreams
Hollow beings summon the storm
Boundless dunes subsume
And grind their cities to dust
Within the furnace of fear
They forge my hallowed shackles
Beholden to my inexorable thrall
I am the barren devourer.
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