Oakland death metallers Vastum‘s fifth album Inward To Gethsemane comes out Friday (11/10) via 20 Buck Spin, but it’s streaming early right now. It’s some of the band’s meanest, heaviest material yet, and the lyrical content is fittingly bleak.
“This album was an opportunity for us to take some of the religious or mystical themes to their limit,” vocalist Dan Butler says in a new interview with Invisible Oranges. “I was thinking a lot about different forms of spiritual agony and modern life. One of them was just like being… abused throughout life, and then living a life of misery.”
“[Our music] needs to be something that’s unsettling,” he adds. “What we’ve tried to do with the band is actually create something that is hard to endure in some way, even if it’s also very gratifying aesthetically.”
Inward To Gethsemane also features dark ambience from band member Leila Abdul-Rauf and collaborator Gregory C. Hagan, and it’s the band’s last album with guitarist Shelby Lermo (also of Ulthar, who released two albums this year), who has been unable to tour while recovering from throat cancer, and who departed Vastum after the completion of this album.
Read the full interview over at IO and stream the new album below.
