Venerated black metal specialists DARK FORTRESS return with a new album, Spectres from the Old World, on February 28th, 2020. Check out “Isa,” the second song taken from the album below.
Guitarist V. Santura about the track: “We are proud to present ‘Isa,’ a monolithic song inspired by Arctic Icescapes. The first single we released on December 20th, ‘Pulling at Threads,’ is definitely one of the fastest and shortest songs taken from Spectres from the Old World. With ‘Isa’ we are putting out a different, opposite aspect: ‘Isa’ is the longest track on the album and probably also one of the heaviest and most epic songs in our discography thus far.”
Morean (vocals) elaborates: “Ice is traditionally associated with death and stasis, and little else. Geologically speaking, this is far from the truth. Sure, nothing but a few hardy snow algae and the odd freak insect can live on ice directly. But if it wasn’t for glaciation, we would have neither the awesome jagged spires of our beloved mountains, nor the fertile ground supporting life at their feet.
“When ice melts, it creates the rivers that sustain us; when it freezes, it serves as a shield for the planet against overheating. If it wasn’t for the conveyor belt of the Antarctic ice cap scraping nutrients from the virginal soil underneath it into the oceans, tropical waters wouldn’t be able to sustain their enormous biomass.
“And, en passant so to speak, the grinding, ever-shifting blankets of ice create the most beautiful artworks ever seen – be it the natural cathedrals of hexagonal basalt created by subglacial volcanic eruptions, the mind-boggling sculptural richness of calved icebergs, or the multi-colored interplay of light in transient ice caves; all that without any involvement of humans whatsoever. To an artist, this is at the same time a humbling and elating realization.”
After a six-year gap, Germany’s darkest sons continue where Venereal Dawn (2014) left off conceptually, Morean (vocals) explains: “Together with the rest of the human race, the protagonist reincarnated as a disembodied creature of pure light in ‘On Fever’s Wings’, the last song of Venereal Dawn. The new album attempts to draw a picture of such a mind’s perspective on life – reincarnating as pure, massless energy. The narrator has become the fabric of the universe itself. This is where heavy physics and string theory come in.”
Spectres from the Old World is more direct, more aggressive than its predecessors. At no time in DARK FORTRESS’ history have they reached so far out into the darkness, only to find the domine of astronomy non-existent, the end merely an end. Recorded, engineered, mixed, and mastered by V. Santura at Woodshed Studios throughout 2019, Spectres from the Old World marks an important milestone in DARK FORTRESS’ journey along actual and spiritual left-hand paths.
