Italy’s DARKEND Announce Fifth Studio Album Viaticum; First Single Streaming

Darkend has announced their fifth studio album Viaticum, which will be released on June 14, 2024 via Time To Kill Records. Preorder on Bandcamp.

Viaticum flows out from the Sacred Spaciousness beyond duality, enshrouding its Silent Nature with the voice of ancient ceremonial chants, dungeon synth ambience and sulphur riffs engraved on arcane metal patterns. Combining shades that span from Mercyful Fate to Dissection (“An Incautious Exhumation Of What Lies Beneath Forgotten Ground”) and from Dead Can Dance (“In Your Multitude”) to Arvo Pärt (“In My Multitude”), the album enlightens an immersive and cathartic pathway towards the deepest hidden fields of who we really are.

First single “An Ancient Plague Has Silently Worn Our Garments As Its Throne” is streaming below.

The band commented: 

“The Light of Consciousness shines on a recurrent form of spiritual pestilence, contaminating the inner world and, consequentially, every shape inhabiting the outer world. When illuminated, what once operated as a form of destroying sickness mutates into a propulsive stream of elevating energy. ‘An Ancient Plague Has Silently Worn Our Garments As Its Throne’ is a haunting picturization of this process. A covenant between suffocating darkness and the radiant gleams of its sublimation, melted in a hypnotic continuum of incorporeal tension.
With lyrics and vocal lines courtesy of Animæ, the core riffs of the song has been penned by Nothingness before him and the band parted ways, while the blazing guitar solo and the harmonized melodic guitars in the middle section serve as an introduction to our new guitarist Acamar. As a circle completes, Darkend would like to dedicate this first single out of Viaticum to Nothingness himself: to his memory and to his legacy.”

Tracklisting:

“In My Multitude”
“An Incautious Exhumation Of What Lies Beneath Forgotten Ground”
“De Masticatione Mortuorum In Tumulis”
“An Ancient Plague Has Silently Worn Our Garments As Its Throne”
“In Your Multitude” 

“An Ancient Plague Has Silently Worn Our Garments As Its Throne”: