Warbringer‘s fifth studio album has been titled “Woe To The Vanquished” and will receive a March 31st release date through Napalm Records. Vocalist John Kevill commented:

“For the music on this record we re-focused ourselves after a lot of the experiments on ‘Empires Collapse‘, and decided we wanted to make a record that is start-to-finish more merciless, ruthless, and cruel, but also maintains some of the more melodic and progressive sense. - Advertisement - What we ended up with is a record that has a lot of traits of classic thrash but also a lot of extreme metal, and a rather unique version of that blend. It’s overall faster and meaner than anything else we’ve put out, but also has our biggest and most ambitious song, the 11-minute “When the Guns Fell Silent” to close the record.”

The outing was produced and mixed by Mike Plotnikoff (Fear Factory, Otep) . Andreas Marschall did the below cover art for it with Kevill, who is studying to become a history professor, saying of it:

“It is directly based on a photograph from the end of the First World War–a grim monument, a pyramid of 12,000 German spiked helmets, right in the middle of New York City. What struck me about the image is firstly how morbid it seems to be celebrating 12,000 dead men and calling it victory.”

He further said of the album and its title:

“The title “Woe to the Vanquished” comes from early Roman history–before they were the huge empire they became. In 390 BC, a host of Gauls led by a warlord called Brennus attacked Rome, and captured all the city except the Capitoline Hill. From this hill the defeated Romans made a bargain, they would pay 1,000 pounds of gold for the Gallic army to leave the city with no further bloodshed. The Romans bring the gold before Brennus, who uses his own scales to measure it. On the Gaul’s scales, the Roman’s thousand pounds of gold measured to be less, which led the Romans to complain that the scale was rigged (it probably was). Responding to this, Brennus speaks “Vae Victis” (Woe to the Vanquished) and throws his sword on the counterweight. Because the Romans lost, they have to pay the rigged sum of gold as well as the weight of the sword, to add insult to injury. The irony here is that vowing this type of humiliation would never happen again, Rome went on to become an ancient war machine conquering and subjugating most of the old world. On the record “Woe to the Vanquished” is spoken in an ironic, mocking tone–the defeated are trampled and time marches on, uncaring, and forgets they ever existed. One of the great things about heavy metal as a genre is you can express tougher subject material than “I met a (boy/girl) and it was (happy/sad)”. I looked for the most monolithic evil I could find to write about with this destructive, intense music… and I did not have to look any further than reality. Forget Satan, that’s a children’s story. Real evil is in the hearts of men.”

The following studio video for that was shared: