When you are named after a Tarot card that symbolizes tradition and convention, you have to be very careful not to succumb to artistic stalemates. No one would ever accuse Italy’s Hierophant of such a thing, but on their latest album—and first in six years—Death Siege, out August 26 via Season of Mist, the band tackle head-on any notion or fears of stagnation. Europe’s most ferocious metallic hardcore band is still mostly intact, but there’s a stunning sense of blackened chaos that is, well, terrifying.
Death Siege is clearly the most evil left turn Hierophant could have taken, and it’s awesome. If you ever wondered what The Secret would sound like if they went full Watain, good (evil?) God, do I have a record for you. Guitarist Fabio Carretti explains why the long wait between records:
“I’ve been in the band since 2017, so it’s been five years. I joined the band right after Mass Grave was released. We get some touring. Then we did release a seven-inch single called “Spawned Abortions.” If you listen to that, you can figure out that things were moving toward a different direction. This is mostly because the singer and main leader is Lorenzo Gulminelli. He’s always been wanting to do that mostly. But when you got people in your band that maybe have different places of music or different views, what do you do? You got to compromise.
“The Thing is, after Mass Grave, two previous members left. And after that, I joined the band, and I am totally agreed with him on everything related to music because I’m a black metal and death metal guy. I’ve always been listening to Morbid Angel, Dissection, blah blah, all the good stuff. And so, I guess that Lorenzo took that chance to be like, ‘OK, now I get another one that is thinking like me, so let’s do some black metal and death metal.’”
“I guess that we started planting that seed in late 2018. But it wasn’t like, okay, let’s do any record. It feels started with trying to figure out the feel and what’s behind it. We did start with an idea of chaos. I have to say that we took a lot because COVID comes in, and we don’t live in the same city. Here we couldn’t even go outside our municipality. We couldn’t see each other for like a year. And we just had Zoom and WhatsApp calls, telephone. It was strange because we always been like a super analog band. Not digital band. We play with Marshall from the eighties. We are very old school about the sound, about how we play. We’ve always been writing stuff and reacting to each other, taking a look in each other eyes. This wasn’t possible because we couldn’t play in person, so we had to figure out a new way of writing stuff. But it was difficult because, since the starting point was feels, chaos feelings, making things that create emotions, how can you create emotion without being in the same room?”
“It’s tough,” he continues, “In a way, we did manage that, but it took way longer. It took a year. We had all the songs. I wrote the lyrics. We started trying and rehashing stuff. And we saw that. We had in mind how things should sound. But in the end, it sound way more extreme than we were expecting, to be honest. I don’t know how to describe it. It was just chaos. Extreme. It was overwhelming. Overwhelming after every listen, and it was good. We didn’t know where things were going to take us, and it took us in the right place, I would say was. It was a fun ride.”
Carretti is dead-on about Death Siege being the most chaotic and mood-centric record in the band’s career. This is no longer just a band happy to perfect their old style of crusty, grindy death-inflected hardcore. Hierophant are a band intent on demanding the listener experience something and emphasizing feeling over form. Carretti was able to harness that vibe and ride the musical lighting while writing lyrics, as he explains:
“I clearly remember the first time that riff came out, and I remember that, to write those lyrics, I just played and looked at those riff like, I don’t know, hours. I was mesmerized by those riffs in my studio here at dark, at night, drinking some whiskey, mesmerized. Totally mesmerized by the mood. And I just started writing lyrics, writing and writing. I’d write pages of lyrics. And that’s the only way I found, actually, to be caught up in the mood, by the feel, listening with your headphones with dark outside because it was the only thing we could do. It was hard, but it was the only way I knew to make things work. And at the end of the day, [it did].”
That whiskey-soaked river of darkness is reflected in exceptionally harrowing lyrics, as Carretti explains:
“While writing lyrics, I’ve always been watching things in third person. It was never like me or for us. It was like the world, and it was mainly seeing that things are helpless. I don’t know how to say that, but it could be seeing things getting to waste and being destroyed, and there’s nothing you can do about that. While you watch it, enjoy. We are doomed. I mean, it’s something that everybody with some brain can [hopefully see]. Things are fucked up. Climate disaster is reaching upon us. We might not have enough power to light our houses or things like that.
“And the war. And we got the war here at our backyards, so fucking close to us. We got destruction everywhere. We got crisis and cruelty and sadness everywhere. What can you do about that? You can describe it. You can look at it, and basically that’s it. It’s what humanity is about, being the worst they can, and we can’t do anything about it. I’m not seeing any other way of writing lyrics apart from that. What we are seeing is that. It’s pure desolation. It’s the universe, as I’m saying many times in lyrics. It’s the universe dooming us. It’s the universe washing at us and leaving us no choices because we don’t have any choices at all. You will see blood-red rivers. You will see piling bodies. We’re going to see death. And we are seeing that all day for no reason other than humanity is sick, and humanity will destroy itself. That’s basically what was behind the lyrics.”
Thankfully, they’ve made it much more artistic, surrealistic, and mystic. Death Siege is the sound of Hierophant becoming their uniquely own thing.
“For us, it was feeling like we did reach a turning point: ‘OK, from now on, this is the new Hierophant, and this is what we’re going to be in the future.’”
It’s like what we would call here in the states “a statement of intent,” but the backbone of the band that fans have grown to love is still very much there. It’s not Hierophant changing who they are; it’s the band becoming who they were wanting to be all along.
“It’s not like a new band. At the end of the day, our background is still the same. It’s not like you can change who you were. It’s us with a new approach, with a new vision, with a new everything, to be honest.”
Watch the video for “Death Siege” here:
For more from Hierophant, find them on Facebook, Instagram, and Bandcamp.
Photo courtesy of Ester Zerbini
