Brooklyn is presently a breeding ground for innovative black metal. Anicon are no exception, counting among their ranks members of Pyrolatrous, Trenchgrinder, Woe, Krallice, Yellow Eyes and more, meaning expectations are high for Entropy Mantra, Anicon’s new full length. Not to worry: the quartet deliver in spades on the album, as new song “Drowned in the Mirage” reflects.
Guitarist/vocalist Owen Rundquist (who also created the artwork for Entropy Mantra) explained that the album was written to reflect the “oppression, anxiety, and darkness of urban living,” something that is clearly transmitted throughout Entropy Mantra, but especially on “Drowned in the Mirage.” Letting the song run for nearly three minutes before any vocals come in, Anicon create a hypnotic vibe.
Rundquist provided a lengthy explanation of what the song means to himself and to Anicon. Listen to the new song exclusively via Decibel and read his thoughts below. Entropy Mantra is available on June 19 via Vendetta.
“Since our first release, Anicon has gone to a lot of different places creatively and I think Entropy Mantra is a good summation or distillation of all those different things. In that way it’s maybe the most unique and also truest music to ourselves that we’ve been able to produce yet. So, I would say this is a living album, one that is a reflection of our immediate present as a collective entity — it is the most Anicon sounding of the Anicon releases thus far.
“‘Drowned in the Mirage’ is a good example of the different territories we end up in throughout the album — it’s both straightforward and direct at times and then there are more experimental musical ideas and structures to be found at others. It has one of the more complicated passages on the album being rounds that are staggered and change count as they overlap, giving an off-kilter feel at times and at others syncing up in unison which lead to calling this the ‘echo song’ while it was being worked on. There’s a degree of improvisation in the leads and some of the melodies in this song that weren’t completely codified at the time of recording and I think that made for some pretty satisfying and unexpected moments.
“Lyrically the song is about becoming lost in insubstantial endeavors or mired in feelings of anxiety and ineffectiveness in one’s own life. It describes aging in stasis with the feeling that what we experience is a mitigated reality in which we determine and define our own anchor points…but that even those anchors are ultimately illusionary.”
