End your week with a bang, courtesy of an earth-shattering new track from avant-garde darlings Veilburner! True to its name, “Glory Glory Grotesque” is a paradoxical bastion of misproportioned riffs and resplendent moments of grandeur! It is beauty and ugliness, heaviness and levity, and it will absolutely set your mind ablaze

Longtime readers of this here truck stop gloryhole blog are no doubt intimately familiar with the deviant hearts behind Veilburner. Way back in 2014, in the early months when none of us had any idea what the hell we were doing, Wunderkind Christian Molenaar interviewed Mephisto Deleterio and Chrisom Infernium on the back of their very first, genre-bucking release as the experimental duo Veilburner. Both the band and this very forum were fresh-faced, eager, and ready to kick conventions in the teeth. That first record, The Three Lightbearers still kicks 20 different kinds of ass, so we were beyond stoked when, about a year later, we were given the opportunity to drop a new song from their brain-bending second record, Noumenon.

Now, three years on, we’re still elated to collaborate with the ambitious duo, recently signed to Transcending Obscurity (congrats!) and set to birth yet another perverse jumble of what Molenaar called, “Morbid Angel-by-way-of-Deathspell Omega stomp!” If there’s one thing that I’ll always treasure about this blogging gig, it’s the chance to see radical, hungry bands like this keep pushing the boundaries and rising to the top.

Thankfully, Veilburner’s latest shows that all those years of toil in relative obscurity were not in vain. “Glory Glory Grotesque” is perhaps the strongest track the band has written yet, one filled to the brim with all of the band’s trademark elements and yet beholden to none of them. Opening amid the ethereal glow of a soft score evoking faint moments of a bygone era that never came to pass, we are thrust into a violent, ugly world like dreamers screaming awake after the sweet release of slumber. A massive death metal riff, still adorned in the gossamer webs of sleep, tears us from the comfort of our beds and thrusts us into a violent world of rattling drums and bowel shaking grooves. Chittering electronic chirps and a grungy industrial tone remind us of the grim reality of today as Chrisom Infernium’s mud-gargling vocals bark assembly line commands at us. Yet, there’s ever an elusive, transcendent element to the music. You hear it in the dim corners of Mephisto Deleterio’s scabrous solos and feel it in the airy heights of the track’s main riff. It is intrinsically entwined in this song, a fairy light just beneath the grimy surface of musical extremity, a nigh-inaudible clarion call back to the achievable impossibilities of dreaming if you can just plunge beneath the shifting drum patterns and crushing bass into the brilliant world below. It is Veilburner’s quintessence, and I cannot wait for you to hear it.

---

A Sire to the Ghouls of Lunacy drops December 28th via Transcending Obscurity. You can pre-order it here and check the band out on Facebook here. Many thanks to our old friends for this premiere.