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VINYL IN PRODUCTION, COMPLETION TBD.
New Orleans black metal sect MEHENET announce the bands highly anticipated sophomore full-length album titled, Ng'ambu - meaning "the opposite shore" - is set for release on September 10, 2021 via Gilead Media.
Five tracks of masterful, ritualistic, and pitch-black evil make up the entirety of Ng’ambu - an album which is meant to be interpreted as a hymnal to invoke and praise spirits - shows the band drenched in offerings to the bands personal connection and dedication to Quimbanda, the Afro-Brazilian diasporic belief system based around magic, rituals, and offerings. The band explains, “It is both an offering to our Cabula, that is our house, as it is to the spirits of Quimbanda themselves. This isn’t a passing interest and all the members of the band have been involved in one way or another in a formal manner. What does it mean to engage these spirits? In some sense we are turning what could otherwise be poison into medicine. It is a process of engaging, through struggle, with those aspects of ourselves and the world which live at the pivot point of chance and desire. It is about seeking agency even in the thistles of the road. Quimbanda is the fire by which we forge our iron and the strangling plants that cure disease. Quimbanda is both the pox and the inoculation. Quimbanda is our anxiety and the motivation that anxiety produces. It is conflict and the strength that comes from engaging that conflict. People say, idle hands are the devil’s plaything, and so we have put those hands and The Devil to work.”
For the band's sophomore release, MEHENET connects a powerful fury of black metal mastery to the deeply rooted sounds of New Orleans - by way of utilizing samples of the bustling French Quarter and by paying respect and praise to the cultural music of the city by incorporating congas, whistles, and bells. Recorded and mixed in 2019 by James Whitten at High Tower Recording in New Orleans, LA and mastered by Dėha at Opus Magnum Studio-Brussels, Belgium, the band captured the intricately woven frenzy of the outfits stunning musicality while interlacing their powerfully provoked hymns with screeches of vicious and commanding vocals, anxiety-inducing swarms of massive riffs, and momentous, hellish drumming.
Ng’ambu will be released on compact disc, digital, and vinyl (coming soon!) and is available for pre-order via Gilead Media. Tape pre-order via Stygian Black Hand.
CD comes packaged in a 4-panel digipak with foldout insert.
Cassette available from Stygian Black Hand: https://
