KHEMMIS – DECEIVER LP

Restlessly awakening from the depths of a feverish slumber, doomed heavy
metal masters KHEMMIS return to reveal their fourth full length studio album,
DECEIVER, arriving via Nuclear Blast Records in November 2021. Six tracks of
desolate, soul-awakening heaviness encapsulate a project that has been nearly
three years in the making. With a title that reflects the internal struggles that
many of us battle in our daily lives, DECEIVER is a ferociously honest and appetizingly
raw piece of musical artistry.
“Thematically, all of the songs are about the many ways that we are tricked
into believing these stories about ourselves–that we are broken, that we are
not good enough, that our genetics determine our fate. This title is the label
that we put on our minds as a force that tricks us into believing these stories,”
describes vocalist and guitarist Phil Pendergast. “The record’s lyrical trajectory
is similar to Dante’s descent into an Inferno of his own making. It is our darkest
album to date.”
“While our minds and hearts are responsible for this kind of deception, so too
is the world around us. There is this dialectic between the two that produces
suffering. Anyone who has struggled with mental health or suffered any sort of
trauma will tell you that there were times that the mind is its own beast that has
to be wrangled,” explains guitarist and vocalist Ben Hutcherson. “In that sense,
we become the deceivers ourselves; we believe we deserve to be the vessel
for this pain and this suffering that is being inflicted on us both externally and
internally.”
The first single LIVING PYRE signifies far more than just the beginning of another
musical endeavour for the band; it is a substantial benchmark for emotional
struggle and growth. “When it comes to my own mental health, when I’m in
a bad place, I can’t access the part of me that creates art. After reaching that
understanding of myself, the bulk of this song came out in one sitting. I was
feeling stable. I was feeling hopeful–even though so much outside in the world
was not exactly inspiring. All of us needed a reason to feel a glimmer of hope,”
recounts Hutcherson. With a big, quintessentially KHEMMIS chorus embellished
by a swampy sorrow, this song incorporates familiar elements of the band’s
sound with a touch of Swedish death metal in its latter half. “The reason that this
was the song that came first lyrically was because I was juggling all the things
that were happening with the inside and outside world intersecting. All the lyrics
for me feel very ‘of the time.’ So much was happening in this world, and they
were just my efforts to contend with it,” explains Pendergast. “Like Ben, this was
a breakthrough moment for me. Once I got the song out, it allowed me to write
other songs for the album. It’s less about the fire metaphor implied by the title
than about the fact that in order to escape fire you have to find water. You find
the deepest, darkest cavern…you just want to stay there forever. It slowly fills up
and you eventually drown.”
HOUSE OF CADMUS was another deeply collaborative writing effort between
all three members of KHEMMIS. “I thought the opening riff had this cool almost-
swing to it…but evil,” recalls drummer Zach Coleman. “I was drawn to the
atmosphere of that first riff, and it felt like it needed to be a song that was dark
the whole way through. Ben and I discussed getting some New Orleans-style
sounds somewhere on the album, and I think this is where we were able to sneak
some in to tie together other aspects of the song.”
“I knew that I wanted the lead guitar line in the second half of the song to tie two
very different parts together,” explains Hutcherson, “but the idea was all really
abstract until we were in a room together. It wasn’t until we jammed out that big
funeral/death doom bridge and the slow, sad coda that we found out what
we wanted that lead line to be: memorable and emotive. It was a very honest
musical moment together.” The writing and recording processes of HOUSE OF
CADMUS were so emotionally driven that even producer Dave Otero of Flatline
Audio (Cephalic Carnage, Cattle Decapitation, Act Of Defiance) encountered
his own deeply personal and intense connection with the song. “With the lyric
turn at the end, I was inspired by Dave’s imagery,” says Pendergast. “This
idea of a person leaving some important part of themselves behind as they float
away and leave the thing they love on the shore. The sound of this song is like a
lighthouse beam cutting through the fog in a dark night on the ocean.”
While the lyrical themes of DECEIVER;sorrow, pain, longing for hope, will no
doubt be familiar to longtime fans, these six songs display a broader collection
of musical influences than on any other KHEMMIS record to date. “It being our
4th album, especially after the transition between the last two albums, it felt
really freeing. We felt that we could really do anything on this record,” explains
Coleman. “There’s a lot here that we’ve never done before,” adds Pendergast.
“In some areas it gets darkly psychedelic. I think we found a cool way to mutate
things using transitions that feel really natural. There is a subtle symmetry
between the first and last songs which is one of the things that makes listening
to the full album a satisfying holistic experience. It builds from almost nothing,
becomes very dark, and then you slowly crawl out of that lowest circle of hell.”
KHEMMIS’s DECEIVER is a beautiful, musically ambitious journey from beginning
to end drenched in impassioned melody and complex, unrestrained variations
of sonic savagery adorned with chilling, intensely tragic cover art by
frequent collaborator Sam Turner.

LP:
Side A
01. Avernal Gate
02. House Of Cadmus
03. Living Pyre
Side B
01. Shroud Of Lethe
02. Obsidian Crown
03. The Astral Road