In the FromSoftware action RPG Elden Ring, you play as an anonymous, mute character belonging to a caste known as the Tarnished. You’re set loose in the Lands Between, a blighted world that has fallen into chaos. Your mission is to restore the Golden Order and become Elden Lord. In the beginning, you’re a weakling, with poor stats and worse armaments. The first bosses you encounter exist primarily to beat you into the ground, to humble you. The low chime that accompanies FromSoft’s signature “YOU DIED” animation burrows its way into your head through constant repetition. At some point, you realize that you can go somewhere else on the game’s massive, open-world map, so you do. You strengthen yourself in encounters with lesser enemies, and eventually, you return to smash that boss that gave you so much trouble a few hours ago. Repeat that process ad infinitum. That’s Elden Ring.

Fell Omen, the Elden Ring-inspired black metal project of the Greek musician Spider of Pnyx, captures the feeling of playing the game remarkably well. The music isn’t written from the perspective of the massive demigods and monsters who rule the Lands Between. Across two preposterously fun albums of punk-inflected, shred-happy black metal – February’s Invaded By A Dark Spirit and August’s Caelid Dog Summer – Spider of Pnyx inhabits the vantage point of what he calls “the little guy.” The little guy gets destroyed over and over again by forces far greater than himself, but he keeps diving back into the fray. His cause looks hopeless, but he always believes that his next attempt will be the time he finally prevails. In Fell Omen’s music, a wild burst of lead guitar represents a raging against the dying of the light, a refusal to succumb to the proverbial iron fist that is forever trying to squash the little guy.

“The crazy solo is there to remind you that the horrors persist, but you have steel. You have something. You have yourself. You have your inner strength, to get a bit cheesy with it,” Spider of Pnyx explains. “That’s what metal represents to me, and punk. Those non-conformist art styles, you know? It’s the steel we still have. Even though they are oppressing us, we still have steel.”

Before launching Fell Omen, Spider of Pnyx (real name Dimitrios Avgoustinos) was best known as the owner of True Cult Records, a boutique record label based in Athens, and as one half of the martial industrial act Under A Banner Black As Blood. In that band, the Spider teams up with Ayloss (Spectral Lore, Mystras) to flip a sound frequently associated with far-right edgelords on its head. In the bio for Under A Banner Black As Blood’s self-titled album, the band writes that it “aims to show that the escapism inherent in such genres can be subverted to serve a purpose.” The project’s explicitly antifascist bent carries through nearly all the bands True Cult releases, even if their politics aren’t always laid out on the surface. In Fell Omen, Elden Ring provides a layer of metaphor, but Spider of Pnyx hopes his message shines through.

“Metalheads, if you show up and you’re like, ‘Capitalism is bad, fascism is on the rise, you have to fix all the bad things,’ their eyes kind of glaze over, because they’re used to Manowar and dragons and all that,” he says. “I think the best approach is to put it through a lens that they can relate to. There’s still the element of escapism there, and the cool visuals and aesthetics to tie it all together. If that’s Lord Of The Rings, or Elric, or anything, that’s perfectly fine. I think the FromSoft games serve [this] project best.”

In my extensive conversation with Spider of Pnyx, we talked about developing the Fell Omen sound, his puckish sense of humor, the value of persistence, and, of course, Elden Ring. The interview below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What was your initial idea for Fell Omen? Was it that you wanted to do an Elden Ring band, or did you just want to do a solo black metal thing?

SPIDER OF PNYX: I had a bunch of ideas stuck in my Notes app. I wanted to do a project where I could just let loose and play something fun, that I couldn’t do in other projects that are more collaborative, more conceptual projects. I just wanted to do my own fun, kind of punky heavy metal thing. And to keep in line with that, I was like, “OK, it has to be one of your silly Dark Souls-inspired ideas, just so you can complete the whole package.”

When was this?

SPIDER OF PNYX: That was, I guess, back in 2020.

Oh, OK, so it was in the works for a while.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, it was mostly during the quarantine and all that. I was getting kind of bored, and I kept having ideas of, “Oh, I’m gonna start this noise project, and I’m gonna just record it in a day.” Or, “I’m gonna do this punk project, and just put it out in a day.” Stuff like that. And I always kept recording for it, and then I got new ideas, and then I recorded more stuff. And I was never putting anything out, because they were all kind of unfinished, because it’s very hard for me to finish projects. At least it was, up until this.

Yeah, because now you have two albums in six months.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah! [Laughs] At some point, I realized that perfect is the enemy of good. I was like, “OK, just get them finished.” Even if they sound rough, even if they sound noisy. Just play what you want to play, arrange it nicely, make it fun, have two-minute songs, three-minute songs, whatever, and just put it out there for people to hear. I still have endless amounts of material stuck in hard drives, for all sorts of sorts of things.

For the next albums.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah.

The only other project of yours that I’m aware of is Under A Banner Black As Blood, which you do with Ayloss from Spectral Lore. That’s more of a martial industrial, power electronics-leaning kind of thing. Had you played metal in this style before?

SPIDER OF PNYX: Not as the main songwriter/guitarist. I’ve been playing guitar for ages, but I never got really serious with it, because I started out as a drummer. And then I was away from music for a few years when I was studying in art school. And then I got back into music, and I started fiddling around with synthesizers, and dungeon synth stuff. So the guitar kind of got left behind. And at some point, I realized if you’re gonna put out your own metal records, you either need a guitarist, or you need to step up and do it yourself. And then I started recording guitar seriously and got more into it.

I’m a little surprised to hear you say that, because the playing on these records is really good. It doesn’t sound amateurish to me.

SPIDER OF PNYX: I took a bunch of guitar lessons with George Bokos. He’s not in the band anymore, but he was Rotting Christ’s guitar player at the time. He has his own bands, and runs his own studio and stuff, but he’s not in the band anymore. So I was trained by a very good black metal player. But I always thought, “Everyone plays guitar, so I have to be the weird, quirky one, and be the synth player, or the drum guy, or, you know, the folk instrument fellow with the hurdy-gurdy and all that stuff.

But now you have a place where you can do it all. Because on these records, you’re doing absolutely everything. There’s not really collaborators here, right?

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, that was the point of it. Just start a project that’s not so self-serious, so you can throw a random hurdy-gurdy in there, or throw this or that in there, without having to run it by anyone, and trying to convince them that, “No, no, no, it’s gonna sound good, trust me!” [laughs]

You mentioned that the idea that you started with was to play punky heavy metal, and that’s very much in Fell Omen, but it’s through this lens of raw black metal. When did that come in, the idea that it would be presented through this black metal filter?

SPIDER OF PNYX: That was twofold. One part of it is that, obviously, True Cult Records is focused more on black metal and dungeon synth and those sounds. It’s not like we’re this big trad/heavy label, or this punk label. So I want it to fit, because I wanted to self-release it from the get-go. I was like, “This is my personal little playground project, it has to be out through the label.” But also, I’m mostly a black metal guy in my listening habits, as far as metal goes. Like, most people got their start with Iron Maiden and Metallica and that stuff. And of course, I also did get my start with proto-heavy bands like Blue Öyster Cult and Deep Purple. But the first proper metal album that I bought was Immortal’s At The Heart Of Winter. I just thought the cover looked amazing. I was 12 years old or something. I was like, “I’m buying this CD because this looks so cool.” So I started with that, and ever since, metal, for me, has to be this extreme thing, with blackened vocals, at least, and this extreme metal energy. It’s very hard for me to get away from that. Even if I’m like, “I’m gonna make a heavy metal project,” it has to be at least blackened, so I feel content with it.

That makes so much sense. Because At The Heart Of Winter is the most “heavy metal” classic black metal album, I think.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah!

Another thing with this project is the way that the melodies are right up front, even though it’s through this raw black metal filter. Was that something that was attractive to you, having those melodies and things that people could sink their teeth into?

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, mostly because of that big period where I was the synthesizer guy. Everything became textures and timbre of the sound, and the sound design aspect of it all. So, in my head, it needed to be both fun-sounding – kind of melodic, with guitar solos – but it also had to sound kind of “dungeon” to me. So, from the get-go, I was like, “I’m gonna record this through pedals that are kinda lo-fi sounding, and then put it through a Tascam tape recorder, and I’m gonna rip it back out, and then put all these textures behind it, and crazy reverbs, and all that.” In order to fit the narrative of what I had in my mind about the sound, and the project at large. I never started off to make a raw black metal record, and I didn’t start off to make a heavy metal record. But this is what the project looked like in my head.

It’s balanced. If you like that raw, gnarly sound, that’s here, but if you just want to fuckin’ rock out to the guitar solos, that’s here, too.

SPIDER OF PNYX: I think a lot of metal bands are too preoccupied with having a great production. And because of my great love for punk, and records that are way more lo-fi sounding, I thought this is the cool sound to do. Have it be kind of rough, and kind of noisy, and, again, very textural, instead of having the big, clean metal production.

You and I both know that there’s way too much shitty raw black metal on Bandcamp. There’s a lot of stuff that’s just simply not very good, and I think some people hide behind some of those textural elements. There’s nothing going on compositionally, it’s just the aesthetic is cool.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Photocopy that cover, put it out.

Yeah, exactly. So having something that is rooted in the compositions, and then on top of that, you have the interesting textural stuff and the production stuff, I think that’s kind of the sweet spot.

SPIDER OF PNYX: I’m glad to hear you say so. Because for the first record, we got some kind of nasty reviews, specifically about the production. I was like, “Is it that bad?”

Has people not “getting it” been something you’ve encountered a lot?

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, but I expected that to happen up to a point. You mentioned bands hiding behind that kind of sound, and I get it. When I was making the first record, I was like, “Is anyone gonna like this? Is my playing good enough? Should I hide it more, put some more reverb on it, and filter it out a bit, so nobody can tell exactly what’s happening? Or turn the volume on the vocals down?” All that. Again, hiding. And I was like, “No, this is not the heavy metal spirit. This is not the punk rock spirit. This isn’t what the black metal spirit should be like.”

My mastering engineer in Nidstang Studios, Angus [Schieber], he was great with this. Because when I sent him the mixes, he was like, “With this sound, I’m thinking of mastering it so it sounds harsh and a bit in the red.” I was like, “You, know, if you don’t like the sound, I can just remix them a bit!” [Laughs] And he was like, “No, this is great. We’re gonna do it like that.” I trusted him, and it ended up sounding exactly how it had in my mind. And yeah, a lot of people don’t get it. I get comments ranging all the way from, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing” to “This sounds digital to me, is this AI?”

Ugh!

SPIDER OF PNYX: Some reviewers, I’m not gonna name names, it was almost like they didn’t listen to the record. It’s like they pressed play on the first song, the sound was very low, and they just skimmed through the rest of it. And it’s OK. It’s fine. I knew it was gonna be divisive, because I didn’t start with a sound in my head, like, “This is a big current band that I like, so I’m gonna have that guitar tone, that drum tone, have it mixed like that, so it sounds like this.” I try to do my own thing, and whenever you try to do that in anything genre-based, be that music or movies or games, you’re gonna get people that are like, “I don’t get what this is, because I can’t quite label it in my head.”

You’ve mostly been talking about the process of developing the first album. To me, Caelid Dog Summer is more confident, more ambitious, more fully formed. It feels like you’re more comfortable in what you’re doing with this band. Do you feel the same way?

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, exactly. That’s why it came out so fast, too. It’s been, like, six months since the first one was released. And a lot of these songs were mostly formed before the first album even came out. It’s all that material I was talking about. Of course, I had to add stuff to them, and finish them, and change them up a bit. Some songs got some new solos that they didn’t have before, or a bridge section. Some became bigger. Some got new intros, some folk instruments added here and there. But a lot of those songs were made before the first record even came out. One reviewer said that, because the first one was 22 minutes and the second one is 29, that it’s like one big LP, A-side and B-side. In a way it is, but also, the second album wouldn’t sound like this if I hadn’t released the first one first, and got some feedback and digested it a bit more. I doubled down on the sound in some ways. I made it a bit more heavy metal sounding in some aspects. But I’m way happier with the second record than I am with the first.

Let’s get into the aesthetics of the project a little bit, because the first thing related to Fell Omen that I ever saw was the photo of you in the chainmail with the motorcycle, and I thought, “OK, I haven’t seen this before.” What was the idea behind that image? What did you want it to communicate?

SPIDER OF PNYX: It kind of follows what I said about wanting this project to be my playground. It’s like, what are your special interests? I love motorcycles, I love heavy metal, I love punk, I love medieval stuff, armor, swords, all that stuff. It can fit with the aesthetic of the whole Dark Souls/Elden Ring kind of thing we are going for, obviously. But that stuff doesn’t have motorcycles in it, right?

Not that I know of.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, but my soul has them. My soul has both. I never wanted it to be a LARPing kind of project either, even though it’s very based in that stuff. I didn’t want it to be this warrior character, and he’s gonna run around in a field with a sword and fight orcs. I always wanted a more punk approach. This is me. This is how I present myself. So it’s what this person would be like, just existing in Athens, in his life. So even though I’m dressed up in a costume, this is my least character-like character. It had to have everything in there. It had to have the motorcycles, it had to have the swords, it had to have his environment around him. And I also love to take cool pictures, so, you know, there’s that. [Laughs] People seem to like that, but some people seem to not understand that it has a bit of an ironic edge to it. Because of course it does. It’s kind of a funny image, right? A big chunky dude with armor and a sword next to a motorcycle. It’s not exactly a serious thing. But also, it’s cool, at the same time. You can have a bit of humor, and also do something that you think is cool, unironically.

Yeah, there’s a fine line that you walk, where it’s funny, but this is not a joke band. That’s kind of a delicate balance, but I think that you do a pretty good job of keeping on the right side of the line. Is that something that you’re conscious of?

SPIDER OF PNYX: I try to stay away from injecting too much meme humor into it, especially because now it seems like all the bands that make it “big” in the scene seem to be expected to be a bit meme-y with their online presence. I hate these buzzwords, and I really didn’t want to do that. If there’s humor in it, it’s just because this is who I am. This is my very personal project. I’m not a very self-serious guy—at least I try not to be. In black metal, it’s a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people. We have even got some media be like, “Is this a joke band? Maybe we don’t want to promote it, because it seems like a joke band.” And it’s like, I don’t know, are Viagra Boys a joke band? Are IDLES a joke band? Just because I try to play a bit with the aesthetics of metal, and try to maybe push it to be a little bit humorous… I mean, I love metal. I’m a metalhead. And I also grew up having Manowar posters, with big, oily, muscular dudes, with scantily clad women hanging from their legs, you know? You can’t take that stuff too seriously.

< b>No.

SPIDER OF PNYX: If you do, you become a weird guy that I don’t really want to be associated with.

I mean, you started with Immortal. Immortal are funny as hell.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, Immortal are a great example of that. Are people calling Immortal a joke band? Yeah, they have some of the funniest music videos and interviews and stuff like that. And Abbath, with his issues, sometimes he goes a bit overboard with it. But those are the people that created this music. Like, Fenriz, right? I obviously love Darkthrone. Is Fenriz a self-serious guy? No. Does that make Darkthrone a joke band? Their previous cover [for 2022’s ] was them ice skating.

And just like you’re saying that this project is the real you, I’m sure those guys just love to go ice skating.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah! Like, they love hiking, so they’re like, “I’m gonna make a song called ‘Hiking Metal Punks’!” [Laughs]

Let’s talk about the newer photo, the Draugveil parody photo.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Oh, yeah.

That was a funny few days on the internet when that Draugveil album [Cruel World Of Dreams And Fears] came out, when everyone was figuring out that it was AI. What was your experience of watching that unfold, and then what inspired you to do your own version of it?

SPIDER OF PNYX: Everyone that’s on the metal internet even a tiny bit got bombarded with that stuff one day. And immediately – I’m also a visual artist, I do all my own covers, I’ve done a lot of covers for the label – so immediately it pops up, and it looks ChatGPT as fuck, right? I can’t lie. And I don’t mind … I do mind AI. What I’m saying is that I don’t mind the meme black metal bands that show up. Like, [Këkht Aräkh’s] Pale Swordsman is everywhere suddenly, because it’s a sad guy on a chair with a sword and stuff, right? If the music behind it is great, and people are vibing with it, great. I wasn’t the greatest Këkht Aräkh fan, but people seem to resonate with it, and I was like, “OK, he has a bit of a weird black metal photo, that’s great.”

Again, it goes back to aesthetics and seriousness and everything. Black metal, when you’re in the dark with a candelabra and your face painted, you can’t pretend that’s the most serious thing ever. So when a guy sits down on a sofa with a sword, it’s fine, right? It’s still the black metal level of silliness. So I didn’t mind that the guy was popping off because everybody was like, “It’s this sad twink with a sword and armor, laying on a bunch of flowers, doing the Michael Jackson pose.” Like, that’s fine. That’s great. What I did mind was the AI stuff. Because I don’t even know. Did you ask it to make that pose? Or did you say, “romantic black metal cover photo,” and it was like, “OK, Lionel Richie is romantic, Michael Jackson is romantic, so let’s put this black metal dude in that pose.” Like, did you make that decision, or did ChatGPT make that decision?

So, everybody seems to go bananas over this. Everybody immediately was like, “Is this AI? Is this not AI?” And I was like, just take a photo, man. Anybody can take a photo. You have a phone, you can take a photo. It’s 2025, man. You can take a photo. You don’t have to do this with AI. So I did it. I was like, “OK, put your money where your mouth is. Just do it, just take the photo.” So me and [Shroudweaver], the co-owner of the label, we got up on the roof one night and took the photo. We laid down some fake flowers we got from her mom’s living room, and we laid them around. The biggest problem was to how to have the floating sword there, because that’s one of the nonsensical AI things. So we had this crazy light stand with a chain hanging from it, so it keeps the sword up. It was an entire production. [laughs] We took the photo, and it kind of popped off for our level of social media presence. So I was like, “Make it the promo picture.”

It blew up! It got out of hand.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, a bit.

OK, well, I saved the best for last, because I want to talk about some Elden Ring stuff, if you’re down.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Hell yeah.

I’m 100 hours in. It’s my first playthrough. I’m in the Mountaintops of the Giants right now. And I’m late, you know? I played it three years late, so I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. When did you get the game? Did you get it right when it came out?

SPIDER OF PNYX: I had it pre-ordered, even though you shouldn’t pre-order games. But I had it pre-ordered, because I love FromSoft games. I loved all the Dark Souls games. I go back even before that, with the Armored Core games, which is probably my favorite game series of all time, which sounds weird to say when you have an Elden Ring-themed project. And then the King’s Field games, and all that stuff.

You go all the way back.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, yeah. So, I had it pre-ordered. It immediately completely blew my mind, even though people were like, “It’s not as hard as Dark Souls,” or “Because it’s open world, it takes too long to get through it,” or whatever, in comparison, again, to Dark Souls. I was like, no, I love this. I want to ride my weird goat-horse around, and stumble into weird dungeons. I love that stuff.

Did you start thinking about making music inspired by it early on?

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah. I’m a millennial, right? I’m part of the generation that has lived through multiple once-a-generation crises. So I’m kind of used to being beaten down by all of that, which is very Dark Souls. You’re this little guy fighting gods and demons and giant elden monstrosities and stuff, and then you die, and you keep coming, and you keep dying, and you keep dying, and you return. I feel all that is very much a great metaphor and parable for what it’s like to just be, like, a guy nowadays.

From the start, I was very inspired by the visuals, and the lore, and the way the lore is presented to you, piece by piece. You pick up an item, and it has a description that gives you a bit of lore. There’s no big exposition happening. They prefer to show stuff than actually outright tell you, a lot of times. But I didn’t want to make another metal project that’s this big, grandiose, top-down view of this fantastical universe, with all that cool stuff. I want it to be from the point of view of the little guy that’s trying to survive that stuff, and get through it, and maybe change things in the end. And from his point of view, everything hurts. It’s an “everything hurts and I’m dying” kind of vibe.

If I made a project based on, say, Armored Core, which I love, it would be about big cool mechs. It also gets a bit weird and oppressive, where there’s weird clone people, but I don’t think I can draw the same line I can draw from Dark Souls and Elden Ring, to what a person in real life might be sort of experiencing in the same way. So it was very inspiring. And with COVID, like, a big plague running amok in the country, it all felt very much like going to this empty kingdom with oppressive guards enforcing the will of these semi-divine, corrupted monstrosities. I felt very much like I need to do a project about this.

I love the perspective of being the little guy. I feel that on this album. Like the “Starscourge” song. If you’ve played that Radahn boss fight, that sensation of frantically running across the arena, trying to get all the summons, trying not to be one-shotted. That feeling of being a tiny person in a giant arena, I feel like that song proceeds in that way.

SPIDER OF PNYX: Yeah, it’s a huge guy that, at some point, when he gets tired of playing around with you, jumps into freaking space and then comes back as a comet. And it’s like, “What am I doing? I’m just a guy with a sword.”

TEN NAILS THROUGH THE NECK

It’s been a killer year for death metal, and one of the albums I’ve gone back to most often has been Hedonist’s incendiary debut, Scapulimancy. In lieu of a pithy little blurb about my favorite song – which just so happens to be the title track, with its twinkling, seemingly Possessed-inspired synth intro – here’s a short bonus interview with AJ, the band’s bassist and vocalist. AJ responded to my questions from a van somewhere in the UK, where she’s currently on tour with her punk band Bootlicker. If you like Bolt Thrower, Dismember, and Discharge, listen to Hedonist.

How did Hedonist get together? I’m guessing you all knew each other already from the Victoria, BC punk scene?

AJ: Cody, Anatol, JP, and I have all played in many punk and metal bands. I think the first time we all met would’ve been at a show in the basement of LBH in Kamloops sometime around 2011. JP and I started Hedonist in 2020. For both being into a niche subculture, JP and I have almost entirely opposing tastes in punk and metal. We wanted to start a death metal band together based on the one thing we both appreciated: Bolt Thrower. We took shared crust influences and elements of Swedish death metal and started Hedonist. Once establishing what the songs for the demo would sound like, we asked Cody to drum for us. After releasing it and deciding to play live, we asked Anatol to play second guitar. All of us have recently completed our first full-length record together.

You currently play in Bootlicker, Crosshairs, and White Collar, and you’ve played in other grind and hardcore-adjacent bands in the past. Hedonist, at least on its surface, is much more straightforwardly death metal. Why did that appeal to you?

AJ: I’ve always loved OSDM, but my bandmates and I growing up were all autodidacts. We taught ourselves how to play instruments and do vocals in our first crust and punk bands. For a period of time, I only cared about playing as fast as I could, with vocals as heinous as physically possible, so this looked primarily like grind and powerviolence projects. I’m at a place now where I’ve learnt enough to generally play the music that I want to appreciate, and I think that’s reflected in the bands I currently play in.

There’s a whole lot of old-school death metal revival stuff right now that’s heavily influenced by tough guy/beatdown hardcore. Hedonist is, obviously, not doing that. Was that something you were consciously looking to avoid?

AJ: We have definitely made a couple fear-based decisions to drop riffs in avoidance of sounding that way.

Hedonist put out a demo, Sepulchral Lacerations, in the summer of 2021. What was the response to that like? Could you feel people discovering it over time?

AJ: Our friends have been extremely supportive and gratuitous from day one. Neon Taste took a leap of faith and immediately put out the demo on a 12″ before it existed as cassette or CD. We didn’t expect the demo to do as well as it did.

How did you end up signing to Southern Lord?

AJ: They reached out to us after seeing a live video of one of our shows. I think the footage was actually from a show that we almost didn’t play because one of our members couldn’t make it. We ended up taking the time to teach one of our friends the set, and he filled in for us.

How does Hedonist tend to write? Is it pretty collaborative between the four of you?

AJ: The writing process takes us a while. It generally starts with an absolute warzone between JP and me. The songs that you hear have won grueling battles between very antagonistic ideas of how death metal should sound. After that, they are eventually brought to the jam room to sort out drums, and on the most recent record, there would be solos for Anatol to flesh out. We also do the recording and mixing ourselves with Cody, so deadlines are for the most part arbitrary. This undoubtedly makes the recording process more drawn out.

What was the biggest difference between recording Scapulimancy and doing the demo?

AJ: Scapulimancy felt like we were trying to perfect the demo. I think every record will be like that, where once you set the rough draft the task from then on out is to get it right. 

Your promo photo shows the band standing in front of a tank. Where was that photo taken? Is there a story there?

AJ: After a great battle and an even greater victory, we decided to get out and take a picture in front of our battle rig. The location will remain undisclosed, and the story is too gruesome to be retold.

Scapulimancy is out now via Southern Lord Recordings.

JOURNEY TO THE WORLD BEYOND

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