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Tension and release, like breathing. Now hold. Do you feel your tendons tighten? The pressure build behind your eyes? Veins pop out and your body strains. Release. Relief feels like an explosion.

Building music based on the future release of tension is difficult. Yes, there is a movement of bands who utilize the idea of crescendo-as-song-form, but that is merely placed in a static vacuum. There needs to be momentum. Movement. The different phases of your body reacting to drowning in the air. Long-standing Colorado black metal outfit Nightbringer's maximalism-based sense of future fruition draws upon terror in micro-bursts, slowly burning, building and gaining speed before you find yourself gasping for the air you thought you were breathing all along. Moments like just before the five-minute mark in "Of the Key and Crossed Bones" feel like a collective exhalation - in tune with the band themselves. Nightbringer's music rides tension for the wave it is, and we all watch with rigor and anticipation of how that wave breaks.

Season of Mist will be releasing Terra Damnata on April 14th. Listen to an exclusive stream of "Of the Key and Crossed Bones" below. Don't forget to breathe.

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From the artist:

""The lyrics work as a hymn to the goddess Hecate as she is depicted in the Chaldean oracles, a series of mystical revelations most probably dating from the 2nd century AD. Here She is understood as the psychopomp and gatekeeper that leads the soul through the perilous passages of the otherworld, unto the light of the Father, identified as the divine Sun."

-ar-Ra'd al-Iblis

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Follow Nightbringer on Bandcamp and Facebook.

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