Gorguts, Cryptopsy, Neuraxis: Montreal his got shit covered when it comes to dark and adventurous death metal. Enter Phobocosm, who should be familiar to dB readers at the point. Their 2014 debut LP, Deprived, scored high marks with us. We hand-selected them to open the Montreal date of 2015 Decibel Magazine Tour. And now, to hammer shit home, we’re debuting the stream of their new album Bringer of Drought before its official release this Friday, May 13. Sayeth the band as one:

“We started working on Bringer of Drought tirelessly right after the release of our first album Deprived. Our intent with Bringer of Drought was to put even more emphasis on the atmosphere that we tried to create on Deprived and to make the music darker, more sinister and more suffocating. As a result, the doom elements that could already be found on Deprived are a little more present this time. There is still a good share of fast parts, but the songs called for more slow parts, so we just went with it. We once again put the slower, doomier song at the beginning of the album to create a crescendo of intensity. Pacing is really important to us. We don’t want our albums to be just a bunch of songs thrown together randomly.

We didn’t intend for the album to be a concept album, but as we worked on the lyrics, we noticed that there was a recurring theme in each song. They all dealt with one of the four elements bringing chaos and destroying everything in its path.

We invested a lot of time and effort into making sure the album would sound exactly like what we had in mind. We really like the sound of our first album, but this time around, we feel that we finally got the sound that we had been looking for from day one. The album sounds great and is very dynamic thanks to Colin Marston’s engineering skills. Since we’ve worked together in the past, he already knew our tastes and he was aware of our band’s philosophy.

Bringer of Drought is the next logical step in our band’s evolution. Musically, it opened up a lot of possibilities for us and we cannot wait to see where it will take us on our next album. One thing’s for sure: darkness, chaos and pain will remain the main inspiration behind our music.”

Click here to pre-order Bringer of Drought (LP version available in June) from Dark Descent Records.