Phobocosm

Phobocosm

Gateway

Dark Descent

***ON OLIVE GREEN WITH ULTRA CLEAR MERGE VINYL!!! Montréal’s Phobocosm return with “Gateway”, an unrelenting and eldritch death metal opus that seals one chapter while unveiling the next. The album includes material from every songwriting period of the band, some of it dating back to the “Deprived” and “Bringer of Drought” eras, as well as “Foreordained”, of course,” explains guitarist Samuel Dufour. “Gateway” was recorded, mixed, and mastered by long-time collaborator Xavier Berthiaume (Gevurah, Sanctvs) during the same session as Foreordained, giving the two records a consistent sonic throughline, while allowing “Gateway” to close established narratives. “We view it as the closing of a chapter for the band,” Dufour continues. “Not that our future material will be completely different fr­om our existing material, far from it, but we have decided to do things a little differently next time around by adding new elements that haven’t appeared in our music before, exploring different dynamics and experimenting with a new tuning. Thematically “Gateway” grows from ideas first explored on Foreordained: “The song ‘Revival’ from Foreordained inspired the album’s theme, which is the fact that humans have been trying to live forever — or to unnaturally prolong life — since the dawn of time, often for reasons even more absurd than the pursuit of eternal life itself,” elaborates Dufour. “We used this as the main theme and pushed the concept further, exploring the most repulsive forms of cruelty humans are capable of — even when using science as a means to prolong barbarity...

Phobocosm

Foreordained

Dark Descent

***ON LIMITED BLUE MARBLE VINYL!!! Montréal’s Phobocosm continue their career-spanning collaboration with Dark Descent Records with third full-length Foreordained. Foreordained is an amalgamation of everything that came before it. A perfectly balanced fusion of the murky death metal depravity of debut Deprived, blended with the devastating doom of Bringer Of Drought. Remarkably, this was the plan all along: “When we wrote Deprived, we decided that our first three albums would be a trilogy, so Foreordained is the last chapter of that trilogy. We made a conscious effort to pace all three albums in a similar manner, since we wanted them to be linked—starting with a slow, crushing doom song and concluding with a long, epic, depressive one. It’s not a coincidence,” reveals guitarist Samuel Dufour. As their genre of choice would suggest, Foreordained’s lyrical concepts are about death, as well as the futility of denying one’s inherent mortality. Hence the name of the album; meaning predestined, inevitable: “Since death is unavoidable, the end of all life and of our planet is also unavoidable, so there are apocalyptic themes also. The closer ‘For an Aeon’ is about a possible way the world as we know it could end.” Wrapped in artwork by the inimitable Lauri Laaksonen of Desolate Shrine, Convocation and Pestilent Hex fame, Foreordained is set to be a 2024 death metal highlight.

Phobocosm

Bringer Of Drought

Dark Descent

Montreal's Phobocosm has returned from the abyss with another offering of oppressive and ambient death metal. The band's newest album, Bringer Of Drought, is an exploration into uncharted darkness. A deeper and more intense experience than its 2014 predecessor, Deprived, Bringer Of Drought features 35 minutes of soul-reaping, doom-infused death. Mixed and mastered by Colin Marston. Bringer Of Drought was unleashed May 13 on Dark Descent Records.

Phobocosm

Deprived

Dark Descent

The long-awaited debut full-length from Montreal's Phobocosm is upon us. Several years in the making, Deprived is a suffocating and beastly dark death metal album with injections of doom, black and ambient elements throughout. Eight songs, 47 minutes. 16 page booklet, with gatefold jacket.