Newly formed, but veterans to the extreme metal scene, VoidOath have remained hidden in the shadows until this very moment. Featuring members of Deplorable and several other menacing bands from the Central American underground, VoidOath represent one of the single heaviest bands ever featured in this column. Deplorable deal in deadly sludge and elements of black, death and doom, but VoidOath seem to derive their sound from somewhere deeper down the abyss. In fact, the Costa Rican quartet self-identify as “abysmal horror doom,” and one is hard-pressed to think of a better term to describe VoidOath’s debut Illumination Through Necromancy.
According to the band, VoidOath began because its members “didn’t really have any room to put out such aggressive sounds with [their] other bands.” Which is intimidating considering how aggressive and over-the-top their other bands sound. “We were seeking a slower and more distorted approach to writing music,” the band writes. “We were able to broaden the spectrum in regards to our influences and apply that to create a different sound.
Illumination Through Necromancy
“We first explored the concepts we were interested in to put into the release and then based on that, we worked on the riffs, tried to make them as excruciating as possible,” they continue. “We later worked on the lyrics to be a conceptualization of the core themes.”
As for what inspires VoidOath’s themes, the band says: “We mostly set out to explore different horror outputs, to boil down our source material to its core emotions and how that emotion translates for each of us. We took an approach to represent these crude, mostly negative emotions that we refuse to acknowledge, but are impossible to deny in our human nature.”
VoidOath informs us that they recorded Illumination Through Necromancy “live [and in] one-take sessions” on April 26 of this year at “Saturno Music with the assistance of Diego Matamoros.” They later re-amped the guitar tracks and recorded vocals. Their demo was then “mixed and mastered by our friend Federico Gutierrez from Colossal Abomination Studios.”
The band says that the duo of Matamoros and Gutierrez “allowed us to explore a raw and organic sound that is well known in this style of music . . . We were looking for the heaviest tone possible, working along with Federico we tried a variety of fuzz and amps to capture that ‘wall of amps’ sound successfully.”
VoidOath’s demo opens with the devastating and monstrous song, “Begetter of Swelling,” reminiscent of contemporary greats Lycus, even legends of the genre, Worship.
According to the band, “this track expresses the primal feelings associated with being on the receiving end of aggression and its toll on the victim’s interpretation of this form of violence.” They go on to mention how the song’s themes were “taken from the relationship dynamics of two characters and how they view each other [through the] perspective of that violence.”
The following song,”Keeper of the Perennial Torment,” according to the band was purposely rendered “as explosive as possible to create a sort of bridge between the first and last track.” VoidOath says: “We like the way this song crushes through the middle of the release and it revolves around codependency and crippling uncertainty.”
Mostly instrumental, the demo’s third and final track represents the perfect closer, guitar solo and all. “The Remnants of Asphyxia” brings the whole thing down on top of the listener like so much gravedirt piled onto your paralyzed and silently screaming soon-to-be-corpse.
VoidOath inform us that “Harmful Existence Productions will be putting out Illuination Through Necromancy on cassette tapes, which are being manufactured right now, hopefully they will be done soon.” The bands they would also “love to have this released on vinyl and CD sometime soon,” so interested labels should reach out posthaste.
Looking ahead, VoidOath say: “Right now we’ve been focusing on the writing process of our full length album, likely to be conceptual, we’re trying to build a coherent sequence for it. We are working remotely due the current circumstances but we keep moving forward.”
The bar for abysmally heavy has officially been raised here at Demo:listen thanks to VoidOath.