TEMPLE OF VOID Lords of Death (CD, LP, TAPE) 28 July 2017

SHADOW KINGDOM RECORDS is proud to present TEMPLE OF VOID's highly anticipated second album, Lords of Death. Ever aptly titled, Lords of Death is an insanely, irrevocably MASSIVE slab of doom-DEATH, and the album by which TEMPLE OF VOID will rightfully take their seat at the throne. Nearly three years in the making, Lords of Death is an experience like no other, and will surely go down as one of the top metal albums of 2017.

TEMPLE OF VOID is an uncompromising collaboration from the depths of Detroit, Michigan. Comprising five musicians who have put in decades of time in the Detroit underground, TEMPLE OF VOID entered this world with singular focus and methodical execution from the start. TEMPLE OF VOID harkens back to the somber sound of early European doom, while channeling the energy and devastation of old-school American death metal. But TEMPLE OF VOID is far more than the sum of its parts: TEMPLE OF VOID destroys.

TEMPLE OF VOID self-released their first demo in 2013. Four weeks later, they had signed to four different record labels to release Demo MMXIII and their imminent debut album across the world. The demo was met with staggering support from the underground, but just over a year later, TEMPLE OF VOID unleashed their debut album, Of Terror and the Supernatural, via Saw Her Ghost Records for the double-LP vinyl version and on CD through Rain Without End Records. The day it was released, SHADOW KINGDOM contacted the band and requested dibs on re-releasing the album to a worldwide audience. Unleashed internationally in September 2015, the slab of barbarity otherwise known as Of Terror and the Supernatural quickly became a critically acclaimed cult hit amongst the press and those looking for the darkest, dirtiest doom-death.

But, with the bar set so high by that debut album, TEMPLE OF VOID swagger forth to eclipse that achievement and soundly obliterate any comparisons with Lords of Death. A prescient title if there ever was one, Lords of Death casts TEMPLE OF VOID in a slightly newer light: whilst unmistakably TEMPLE OF VOID, this is the sound of the band shorn of any fat and fully representing the powerful, punishing experience of the band in a live setting. It's still signature TEMPLE OF VOID, to be sure, but Lords of Death emits an enviable amount of focus and forward momentum, with the band largely ditching the doomier tropes in favor of ones reflective of their all-consuming onstage power. Instead, TEMPLE OF VOID emphasized the deathlier aspects of their debut, but pumped them full of addicting, headbanging energy. Put another way, whereas Of Terror and the Supernatural was doom with death metal, Lords of Death is death metal with doom. Fittingly, the production here is utterly CRUSHING, and once again recorded at Mount Doom in Detroit.

Completed by appropriately morbid artwork by Paolo Girardi, Lords of Death is that Rubicon-crossing moment where a band becomes masters. Recommended for fans of Autopsy, Bolt Thrower, Grave, Asphyx, Edge of Sanity, Obituary, Hooded Menace, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, and the early works of Paradise Lost, Morbid Angel, and Opeth - behold the new lords of death, TEMPLE OF VOID!

"An uncompromising record from the band that made one of the very best, if not THE best death/doom debut in last five years or so. Weighty death metal groove and suffocating, gloomy atmosphere in just the right mix together. Album-of-the-year material!" – Markus Makkonen (Hooded Menace / Sadistik Forest)

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Tags:  Temple of Void, Lords of Death, Detroit  

Sevine E. Levine    June 23, 2017