The legendary Dutch death doom elite band ASPHYX will release their tenth full-length studio album “Necroceros” on January 22, 2021 via Century Media Records. Today, the band has shared the video for the new song “The Nameless Elite.” The clip was created by Maurice Swinkels/Younique Film (Legion Of The Damned, Exodus, Kataklysm, + more) and you can watch it below.
Front-man Martin van Drunen checked in about the song and clip, saying, “This third single of our forthcoming Necroceros album is entitled ‘The Nameless Elite’ and is about modern-day warfare, especially about the brave men and women in the many international elite units that combat any form of terror to protect us all against violent acts of insanity. We thought the location at the Overloon War Museum was a fantastic one to shoot a video for any kind of song dealing about war and the Sherman tank in the clip actually did serve during WWII on the battlefields in that area. It may not be directly related to the content of the track, but Asphyx is a band that has always and will always take on any subject concerning war, without glorifying it. War is Hell.”
He finishes, “We would very much like to thank the wonderful cooperative people of the Overloon War Museum in The Netherlands for giving us permission to shoot there, causing pleasant chaos with our noise and smoke!”
“Necroceros” was recorded at Tom Meier‘s Tom Meier Studio and at Paul Baayens‘s The Mörserstudio, and mixed and mastered by Sebastian “Seeb” Levermann at Greenman Studios. It once again features front cover artwork by Axel Hermann. Pre-order the record, which comes in various configurations, here.
Regarding the recording process of the album Martin adds: “The first recordings for ‘Necroceros’ started somewhere in November 2019. Mainly just rough ideas. We hired Tom‘s studio for a couple of jam-sessions so we could record as soon as we thought something had potential. We finished about 6/7 songs, but after a few listenings we decided there had still quite some work to be done.
After the 3 previous albums and this one being ASPHYX‘s 10th official full studio record we were very well aware that the standard had to be incredibly high. Our advantage was that for the first time we had a steady line-up. Since “Incoming Death” we were damned good “worked in” together, one “felt” what the other wanted or where he was music-wise going. With Paul having tons of riffs on the shelves, the earlier takes and the unexpected rapidly spreading Covid-19 outbreak and thus all our gigs being canceled one after the other, we booked Tom once more for a bunch of jam-recordings. Which turned out marvelously…
It took 2 weekends to finally arrange all songs and tape the drum-tracks. Going completely berserk while playing and being totally satisfied with the variety, rawness, brutality and dynamics of each particular track, we were 100% certain that we were heading in the right direction.
Long before all the above was happening, I already had introduced “Necroceros” as a working title. It came out spontaneously, sounded powerful and since we used the word “Death” in every release-title, so did “Necro”. The idea was a sci-fi fantasy entity on an eternal course, existing only to devour planets, turning universes into meaningless voids. And while the boys were laying guitars and bass over the drums I searched and wrote the themes and lyrics for every single track. And there we were…
To mix with Seeb was a shot in the dark, but he had told me one of his wishes was to ever be able to mix a Death Metal album for a band like ASPHYX. And since we wanted a fresh input, we gave him a chance by letting Seeb do a test and it fused simply excellent.
As always, we passed the working title on to Axel Hermann to skizz about and let him throw his morbid imagination over it with detailed bits and pieces. And once more he didn’t let us down with another brilliant masterpiece.
And here we are. Something old, something new, something krushing, something sparkling, something alcoholic, something genius, but all very, very ASPHYX!“
“Necroceros” Album Artwork
“Necroceros” track listing:
01. The Sole Cure Is Death
02. Molten Black Earth
03. Mount Skull
04. Knights Templar Stand
05. Three Years Of Famine
06. Botox Implosion
07. In Blazing Oceans
08. The Nameless Elite
09. Yield Or Die
10. Necroceros
