Exclusive Track Premiere: Pneuma Hagion’s “The Temple Fires”
Arise my faithful servants…
On August 30, 2024, Texas derelicts Pneuma Hagion will release From Beyond, the group’s third LP and first for Italian purveyors of all things bloodily consecrated Everlasting Spew Records. Thick, raw, crushing, and totally unfiltered, From Beyond sees Pneuma Hagion fully refining their love of all things Morbid Angel and Lovecraft while also tapping into something even more fundamentally evil and profound.
Today, we here at the Toilet are stoked to bring you the album’s second single “The Temple Fires.” Situated smack dab in the middle of From Beyond, “The Temple Fires” builds on the album’s first single “Harbinger of Dissolution,” demonstrating the band’s knack for taking everything that made Gateways to Annihilation an instant classic and distilling it to its purest form. Owing to excellent production and mastering, each aspect of “The Temple Fires” is digestible, discernible, and at its most powerful. R’s vocals are guttural but utterly intelligible while his guitar and bass have the appropriate heft and down-tuned bellicosity to clear out any pit at any venue regardless of size. Shane Elwell’s work behind the kit is steady and provides the perfect crooked steel-enforced spine to hold together R’s riffs. Moshing, stomping riffs are interrupted by pinch harmonics and brief twisted runs. Along with Morbid Angel, you might remember fellow Texans Malignant Altar and just how preciously absurd Retribution of Jealous Gods was. There’s just something about Texas Death Metal, I suppose. Yeah, we might be circle-pitting around the 1:10 mark, but by 1:35, there’s a sense of foreboding creeping in, as the riffs start to fray just a bit before everything comes to an impossible crawl at 2:10. From there, we’re choking the life out of the sacrificial offering, which, as we all know too well, is our very bodies, served up to a merciless god.
In that sense, we’re all, collectively, the various figures in William Blake’s The House of God, the 1795 painting that serves as the artwork for From Beyond. Though the band explicitly cites Lovecraft as a primary influence on the chthonic horrors they hope to unleash with this album, they’re also, by referencing Blake and Milton, tapping into something even more literary and nearer to religious piety, asceticism, and punishment at the hands of God. The archangel Michael stretches its holy arms across a scene of prostrate and dejected human forms. Either writhing on the floor or bowed in grief, the scene of The House of God is the immense pain of humanity ejected from Eden, separated from its maker, cast out into perdition and an unknowable and godless world. Pneuma Hagion, which translates to Holy Light from the Biblical Greek, shines most brightly on the most abjected forms of our lives. “The Temple Fires” is far-rang, “casting its gaze across the universe,” in search of something to unburden humanity but finding nothing.
While August 30 feels far away, hopefully this track will “sate your hunger” like the temple fires contained within. Having spent an almost inordinate amount of time with the full album so far, I can simply say: this is the tip of the gouging, catastrophic iceberg that is From Beyond.
Consecrate your altar with From Beyond
on Everlasting Spew Records come August 30.
Buy the album. Buy the merch.
Look for more tracks in the future.
This album has legs. Be forewarned.
