Exclusive Track Premiere: Ectovoid’s “Irradiated Self”
Pour clarity into my eyes.
On January 9, 2026, Birmingham’s Ectovoid will release their third full-length In Unreality’s Coffin via Everlasting Spew. Featuring members of bands connected by I-20 here in the Deep South such as Father Befouled, Seraphic Entombment, and now, post-recording, Metaphobic, Ectovoid have been playing an existentially itchy version of grinding black/death metal since 2010. Ectovoid channel the gory, embodied horror of Autopsy and Necrot through an astralized lens of universally vacant dread. Earlier this year, the band primed long-time fans for new music with a vinyl reissue of 2015’s Dark Abstraction, an album that Ryan from Cemetery Filth named as one of the year’s best and garnered further praise from lizards of bygone eras. Following this reissue, we’ve been treated to lead single “Collapsing Spiritual Nebula,” a winding Escherian piece of OSDM that finds comfort in the cosmically uncomfortable and meaning in the infinite indefinite. The solo that comes spiraling out of seemingly nowhere raises the stakes just enough to make the eventual descent back into the track’s otherwise unrelenting madness all the more narratively crushing.
Today, we’re thrilled to bring you the album’s second single, “Irradiated Self.” A scabbed and encrusted Acephelix-esque riff rips open the track which then finds its groove in a deeply satisfying back-and-forth, beck-and-call vocal performance between CS and CB. The parenthetical lyrics begin in satisfying slant rhymes (reborn/rejoined, pestilent/cold essence) before the pattern breaks, leading to a hellish turmoil of “laboured resurrection,” “horrid comprehension,” and “screaming pleas.” Yes, we’re still suffering from the terror of embodiment, but it’s less the act of lugging around our “blubbering mass” than it is the entrapment of our “defective thoughts” that is so monstrous and distressing. To be sure, an “irradiated self” calls to mind radiation and exposure to it, but to “irradiate” can also simply mean to illuminate or shed light upon. In the staggering, endless, impossibly empty blackness of the void that surrounds us, what could be more shocking than to have one’s self illuminated. Simultaneously too much and infinitesimal, you are nothing but “Twilight’s infidel / Beleaguered and withheld / From truth’s immortal spell.” Oh, to be part of the ecto-void that is always outside and surrounding us.
Unnerved? Distressed? Feeling exposed and vulnerable? Looking to escape into emptiness? Too bad. Our curse is to matter and not matter all at once. Press play below to participate in the mystifying experience of existing.
In Unreality’s Coffin lands
via Everlasting Spew on 1/9/26.
Look at that Girardi album art
and have it look back at you.
Tapes, CDs, and digital in January.
Vinyl later in the spring.
