Progressive extreme metallers ALKALOID prepare to unfurl their new many-tentacled full-length, “Numen” via Season of Mist. Featuring members of Triptykon, Obscura, Dark Fortress, and Obsidious, the Germany-based quartet of Morean (vocals, guitars, concepts), Hannes Grossmann (drums), Christian Münzner (guitars), and Linus Klausenitzer (bass) construct upon, expand away from, and journey between previous full-lengths “The Malkuth Grimoire” (2015) and “Liquid Anatomy” (2018) on “Numen”. In every respect, ALKALOID recommence the purposeful warp of various metallic genres they dimensionally blur. Tracks like the video single for “Clusterfuck,” “The Cambrian Explosion,” and “Numen” posit heavy cosmological/Lovecraftian theoretic themes on top of musically-adept songs that are accessible yet undeniably intricate.
ALKALOID are mad scientists. With each album, the extreme metal concocters have poked and prodded at mysterious phenomena both of this world and far beyond. They’ve written a song about what lies beneath the Antarctic crust, as well as an ongoing saga about a galactic civilization that ascends to a god-like-level of domination.
The European super-group have written multi-part odes to cosmic Lovecraftian entities and ancient Cephalopods who rise up to rule over the future of the Earth. Think of their new single as extreme prog. metal’s answer to the Big Bang theory. “The Cambrian Explosion” compresses four billion years of multicellular evolution into mere minutes. Microbes cluster together. Ancient mycelium stir in the grooves of slimy cell walls. Pulsating stenches soar from trenches, thrust into hyper speed by blistering drum chops and colorfully infused riffs that explode like supernovas.
This song was initially written by former guitarist Danny Tunker, who left it as a sort of parting gift. It’s fitting then that it started as a tribute to ALKALOID‘s death metal roots. But this band have never stayed put long enough to be classified as just one genre. “The Cambrian Explosion” is littered with surprises. We won’t give everything away. But when the breakdowns hit, just know that you need to be prepared for anything, whether it’s a flair of flamenco or a Stygian choir.
Here’s what ALKALOID have to say about their new single: “Danny left us this song before he quit the band. It started as a tribute to our tech death past, but after some additional mangling by the band, the song became something we’re not sure any longer where it belongs, but which excites us all the more for it. The lyric describes four billion years of evolution of multicellular life in under four minutes. We no longer consider ourselves part of the tech death genre; in fact we never did. But we always embrace musical extravaganzas, and felt that this insane little missile of a track as a nod to both where we came from musically and to Danny’s importance in this band in the past fits perfectly in between our other new songs on the album. As luck would have it, we were able to include a passage with a gospel choir directed by Sara Robalo, and managed to include a few other spontaneous and unexpected twists in the spur of the moment. Enjoy!”
Now, after five years, ALKALOID are back with their third full-length and it’s got some of their most intricate, thought-provoking and bat-shit insane ideas yet. “Numen” is a 70-minute monolith of an album that doesn’t just colonize interstellar space with sentient fungi and cephalopods. No; it grabs the fabric of the universe and ties it into knots to break time and space themselves. The Bavarian band plays around with all kinds of genre experiments, effortlessly flipping death metal on its horned head with seductive flurries of jazz, flamenco, rock and gospel choirs.
“Numen” will be released on September 15, 2023 by Season of Mist. Pre-save the album HERE. Pre-order it HERE.
“Numen” Artwork
“We’ve all been around the block a few times by now as metal musicians,” says song-smith Morean. “The feeling that we’ve outgrown the narrow niche of pure extreme metal was a main motivator to start this band in the first place, ten years ago. The ‘prog’ tag is handy for us because, per definition, it already encompasses a wider range of possible styles and influences we can get away with than any one specific metal genre. This means we could ensure from the beginning that we’ll always be able to write whatever we want, no matter how crazy our ideas become. The heart of this band is always the songwriting, and we all like complex and virtuosic music in all its diverse manifestations. However, we do share a love for death metal as the smallest common denominator in the band, and we wanted to make sure no one thinks that just because we include melodies, clean guitars, and influences from other genres, we’d automatically sacrifice the brutality and relentless esthetic of extreme metal.”
“Numen” was written during the pandemic, but it was planned long before the scourge of disease wracked humanity. As a result, the songwriting sessions were predictably not “in the room” but over the Internet after the band members had isolated and worked on their constituent parts. Demos flew back and forth. Then, Tunker left amicably for personal reasons. ALKALOID could’ve folded, but the close-knit group soldiered on. They intensely relied on the professionalism and dependability of the collective to drive “Numen” to completion. The complications of the two years it took to sonically inscribe the album into aeonic vastness didn’t fragment the end result. Instead, the process accelerated ALKALOID’s lambent, eldritch explorations. “Clusterfuck,” “The Cambrian Explosion,” “Numen,” and “A Fool’s Desire” expertly bridge the past to the future, where ALKALOID’s originative, daedal storytelling captures (and holds hostage) the imagination.
The title, “Numen”, got its start at the dawning of ALKALOID. It’s a word that Morean fell in love with immediately, and he knew it had a place in his creative endeavors. Whereas “The Malkuth Grimoire” talked about combining existing elements into new structures, and Liquid Anatomy dealt with the creation of new elements, “Numen” tries to look at the universe from a kind of meta-perspective from an imaginary god, as if the space that everything happens in was given a voice and a role as observer and shaper of everything that happens. In it, sentient panspermic mycelia are swathed in Lovecraftian nastiness—like Shub-Niggurath and the Fungi from Yuggoth—while the new Dyson chapters interpret the aspiration to reach divinity rather literally, reshaping the entire galaxy by manipulating spacetime itself. Desperate to escape their doom, the Cephalopods from previous songs have returned, too. “Numen” is dense but not impenetrable. In fact, from the first moments of opener, “Qliphosis,” to the final contemplation of closer “Alpha Aur,” ALKALOID prove to be more charismatic than ever.
Line-up:
- Morean / Guitars, vocals
- Christian Münzner / Guitars
- Linus Klausenitzer / Bass
- Hannes Grossmann / Drums
