Melbourne based rock/metal giants Suspyria have announced details about their new studio album “The Valley of Despair”, set to be released on October 7th, 2022. Produced by Christopher Vernon (Stuck Out, Deadlights, Better Half…), “The Valley of Despair” includes 9 new tracks introduced by the first single “The Damage”; the video is available below.
Talking about the concept of the album, frontman Terence Stevens says: “After our debut release ‘Regression’ in 2019, just as we started our journey as a band in the Melbourne music scene, the world stopped. COVID halted us just as we’d left the start line. The band were stuck in this predicament of what to do. We’d spent so much time invested in this, we couldn’t stop now? Could we? No, we couldn’t, so we went inward and started working on our sophomore follow up release. It started with the need for a purpose, a context to our endeavour and a reason to write. This next record was going to be dark and gloomy, something heavy with 00s inspired riffs, a colossal cascade of drums, and thundering low end to break down some walls. We decided to write about loss & death. Loss is a broad contention to write a record on, but when focussed in, we started to think about what we’d lost in our lives. Death was something that a few of us had first hand experience in. Losing loved ones is a traumatic and powerful thing to go through. There is a lot of pain and suffering to be touched on. But there is beauty in the pain when you can channel it, create art to visualise that pain. And turn it into something timeless to carry the memory of those you lost”.
An important step ahead in terms of creativity, between melody and heavy stuff: “This album has a lot of personal metaphorical & anecdotal lyrical concepts. Blended together with soaring Melodies, and crushing guttural scream vocals emphasising the emotive poetry. Backing behind this are some of the heaviest guitar riffs and most technical instrumentals we’ve written to date. All the music is specifically written to carry the contention of the album. Each instrumental part was written to cohesively tie together and rumble under the vocal line as they sway the listener from sing to song through the crescendos of this album. The first song to come together was “The Damage”. The vocals were super easy to write and came together within a day or two. But the instrumentals probably took a few days of jamming out in my home studio. I remember I was doing singing lessons at the time, my singing instructor had given song writing homework, which I had taken much more literally than she realised. The next week during our lesson I came to with an entire song written which was a shock for her to say the least”!
Tracklist:
01. Tabula Rasa
02. Vultures
03. The Damage
04. Dead in the Water
05. The Violence
06. To the Grave
07. Sea of Doubt
08. Heart Strings
09. The Valley
