Track Premiere: Diabolic Oath – “Winged Ouroboros Mutating Unto Gold”
Fear, anxiety, terror.
A skeleton wrapped in red robes sits atop a pile of writhing, anguished humanity. Above this figure hang 9 swords, arrayed with blades towards the figure but almost as a crown. Drawing from the Major Arcana, one might think that the cover image of Diabolic Oath‘s forthcoming sophomore record Oracular Hexations is the articulation of a world beset by isolation, joylessness, despair, and nightmares. Oracular Hexations, a title in itself that hints at some kind of endless envisioning of ever-worsening current and future conditions, is suffused with the same looming Damoclean dread.
Set to release April 5 on Sentient Ruin, Oracular Hexations sees these “abysmal alchemists of lysergic black/death abominations” return with an offering even darker, heavier, and more unhinged than 2020’s excellent Profane Death Exodus. Fans of Diabolic Oath’s roaring triple-throated vocal attack, vicious drumming, fretless and frenzied riffing, and war metal sensibilities will not be disappointed. Newcomers will find an album backed by a fuller production, one that makes rooms for every aspect of the band’s remorseless belligerence. It is primeval and primordial, to be sure, but it’s also attended by a drive towards surrealism, towards a future far more bewildering than the oracle could ever predict.
Today, we’re thrilled to premiere “Winged Ouroboros Mutating Unto Gold,” the album’s third and exemplary track. The listener will immediately fall into the pits of the song’s mid-paced death metal groove, cymbals clanking and cracking above the din of the relentless riff. Before long, though, the listener is ripped out of the relative safety and comfort of the opening riff and sent through a dizzying assemblage of frightening, unhinged, enigmatic, and unconventional passages, each one stacking on the last to produce a tenuously towering and vertiginous effect. Once the original riff returns, the band has lost all patience with its straight-forwardness, instead opting for more malleability, mutating it into an almost unrecognizable version of itself.
The band has this to say about the track:
“Winged Ouroboros Mutating Unto Gold” has all the warped hallmarks of the Diabolic Oath sound but, like the rest of this album, takes things one step further with regards to unconventional arrangement and overall brutality. In terms of tone and pace, it stays in the lower ranges and is overall a mid-paced leviathan with a few exceptions.
That’s basically what I said! So click the YouTube link below and join me in the surrealist grotesquery that is “Winged Ouroboros Mutating Unto Gold.”
Oracular Hexations arrives via Sentient Hate
on April 5, 2024. Pre-order it HERE.
You can get it digitally, on CD, on cassette,
on vinyl, as a special 2xLP + 7″ bundle, or, if you’re lucky,
one of the few die hard-packaged test presses.
