Exclusive Track Premiere: Skaphos’ “Hypoxia”
Manifestly dead.
On May 9th, 2025, French quartet Skaphos will release their third benthic horror Cult of Uzura via Transcending Obscurity Records. Trawled up from the deepest, bleakest oceanic depths, Skaphos’ forthcoming album—the first on any label—is a protean and esoteric form of black/death metal, hearkening back to the ancient disfigurations of both genres while monstrous and new in its current iteration. Fans of Sulphur Aeon‘s cackling calls from the Lovecraftian beyond will certainly find affinity here, as will those who enjoy the twisting, winding compositions of Shrine of Denial or the heady, riff-forward mysticism of Saevus Finis. From the sea we emerged in our most basic form, and so “All Shall Now Be Itself the Sea.”
Thus far, we’ve been treated to “Cult of Uzura,” “Abyssal Tower,” and “Skaphism.” Earlier in the year, I described the first two single as “chthonic and vertiginous” and the band as “gesturing towards dissonance.” The latter of these three tracks, “Skaphism,” is appropriately one of the album’s most aggressive tracks, though it, too, cannot avoid the burbling, bubbling call of the ever-surfacing dread that seeks to pull us deep below. First depicted by Plutarch, “scaphism” is an Achaemenidian method of torture and execution in which the offending party is fixed between two boats, force-fed and covered in milk and honey, and thus, “creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed.” Fortunately, though these songs might worm their way into your brain, taking up what precious space is left, the experience is nothing like that of Mithridates.
“Hypoxia,” the album’s 4th single, fits alongside these earlier singles and captures the album’s watery, subsuming essence. Mastodon‘s Leviathan was famously described as being written to evoke in the listener the sensation of being on the Pequod, tossed about by the murderous sea. “Hypoxia,” as well as tracks such as “Mad Man and the Sea,” arouse a similar feeling. Imagine “Seabeast” being filtered tumbling through a black/death lens away from its proggy-sludge leanings. Brackish riffs and seasickened rhythms knock the listener to and fro. The nauseating density gives way around 1:45 to a harrowing, almost melodic passage, one of disquieting and eerie calm, before the waves rise up again to crash and split you asunder.
About “Hypoxia,” the band had this to say:
”Hypoxia” is one of the first songs we wrote for the third album. We first played this song back in japan in 2022. Over time the song changed a bit but its core stayed true. “Hypoxia” is about drowning and has a lot of mood swings. It symbolizes all steps of drowning: the panic, the suffocation, the acceptance and the final suffering, when all goes dark. This song has a peculiar meaning to us, and it is one of our favorite songs to play live.
Moody and fearful, the song swallows the listener in its gaping and gulping nautical maw. I’m thinking about a poem I recently read from Daniela Danz, one that narrativizes being swept away in a deluge: “wash / jellyfish into our soup bowls / and ramshorn snails into our hair/ as we swim in each other’s direction panicked / with our yearning for one another / because almost nothing is left because it’s all gone / and thoroughly soaked through with regrets.” Danz’s awkward line breaks here are the moments we break the surface to gasp for air before being sucked under again. We are permeated and submerged. Of course, this apocalyptic “Hypoxia,” this diluvial era, is of our own making. “Four decades of neoliberal reform have unleashed an ethical apocalypse,” writes Bifo Berardi. “Both empathy and universality, the two roots of ethical behavior, have been torn away. Empathy, the perception of the Other’s body as an extension of one’s own, is under increasing threat.” Breathing, Berardi writes, is “a vibrational search to attune oneself to one’s environment” and co-conspirators. We are panicked and swimming in each other’s direction, but we are also suffocating and must ultimately accept our folly and fate. As Ishmael tells us in Moby Dick, “For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” The madness of “Hypoxia” is the madness of our drowning world. Take your final gasps of air with Skaphos.
Cult of Uzura arrives May 9th via Transcending Obscurity Records.
Best believe the merch is too sweet.
Order a few pieces and show off that Paolo Girardi artwork.
