Usnea To the Deathless

Usnea Bring the Cosmic Doom with New Single "To The Deathless" (Early Track Stream)


After six years, our cosmic overlords have returned. Portland-based doom band Usnea are back with Bathed In Light, an album that is every bit as heavy as their previous work, but even more deep and reflective than other records. Today, they have graced us with an especially esoteric track, “To The Deathless,” which is a perfect sampling of what the album has to offer: the track examines the double-edged sword of technological progress (as guitarist and vocalist Justin Cory explains below) through a complex mix of psychedelica and heavy doom.

Regarding “To The Deathless,” Cory comments:

“To the Deathless” is about the ambiguity of technology and the so-called progress it is so often touted out to represent in our civilization. Joel Williams (bass) and I wrote the lyrics using the case study of Nobel Laureate Fritz Haber, the inventor of the nitrogen-fixing fertilizer process that led to the ‘green revolution’ and the feeding of countless people—but whom also invented the Zyklon-B gas used by Hitler in the Shoah (holocaust) to kill millions of Jewish people. A tragic irony was that Haber was also himself Jewish, and he was persecuted by the Nazi regime himself.

He is a perfect representation of the false binary of technological progress; he saved millions of lives by increasing the capacity of farming to feed more people with less land, but he also created the very gasses that were employed to commit genocide. We’ve all seen how dystopian technology really can be in spite of how it is sold to us. Climate change, social media, the surveillance state, corporate intrusion into every aspect of our lives through smart phones, the dilution of worker’s agency and power through automation and productivity quotas…

As for the songwriting, this song was finished in another form prior to the pandemic. There is video out there of that version live, but we felt something wasn’t working with it, so we rewrote parts of it several times over the years since then, and its final form is a bizarre thing to behold. I think it exemplifies our stochastic blend of influences well.

Bathed In Light releases May 26 via Translation Loss Records.