Today Sepulchral Voice Records and Dark Descent Records proudly announce the 23rd of February 2024 as international release date for Vircolac’s new full length album.
With their second album ‘Veneration’, Vircolac are balancing on a razor’s edge… confidently and with combat boots… creating their best release to date.
The album encompasses the whole world of Death Metal, but it also adds another world, a much darker one. The Wolves have managed to create an album full of anger and tragedy. An album full of doom and conviction and they spit it out into a world that is obviously choking on generic, soulless and technically “perfect” standard “Death Metal” releases.
You can hardly write and play Death Metal in a more personal and emotional way. Although the album does not reveal it’s entirety on first contact, it will be generous to those who fully engage in it. ‘Veneration’ meanders between choleric outbursts and epic arrangements with an eerie, deeply funereal atmosphere that apparently only Irish bands are capable of writing.
‘Veneration’ is bloody, it is epic and it is timeless. It combines tradition and Zeitgeist and consciously rejects everything that is polished, fashionable or blatant. The result: Vircolac’s black is darker and their fire is brighter. And this is what you can feel when it slowly creeps under your skin.
The album will appear on good old Compact Disc (Digipack), 12″ vinyl LP and all the digital formats. Our comrades of Dark Descent Records will conquer the new world, Sepulchral Voice Records infects the old world.
Vircolac stated the following:
As the sun stands still in the sky, in the depths of winter, at the darkest time of year, we are pleased to announce the international release of our second full length album ‘Veneration’.
Recorded during the the 10th year of the band’s existence with Shaun Cadogan at Last Light Recordings in April 2023. In the aftermath of our debut album, Masque, we met a world of fear induced mania resulting in our own retreat from the glaring light of day and into our respective lairs where we set about working towards what would become our second full length album, ‘Veneration’.
An intense labour of songwriting emerged during the winters of discontent coupled with the ebb and flow of musicians from the band resulting in a triumph over tragedy for the three core members that now form the nucleus of Vircolac.
The album title comes from many epic wanderings through an ancient landscape in solitude, seeing stone monuments from a long forgotten past that were erected to venerate the dead and so, as a nation where veneration is an essential part of the daily life of its people, and the past very much a place where the dead join the living, the question was prompted; who will venerate us? What have we done to warrant any veneration?
Thematically, the lyrics reflect on the many deathly topics infused in our ancient cultural lore. From the bloodshed that has fed the land for generations, to the gods and goddesses still invoked to this day and the fallen martyrs whose idealism never came to pass. And so, as in life, all comes to pass and as we fade, nothing shall remain.
Stylistically, Veneration is unquestionably a Death Metal album from beginning to end. Fusing expansive influences from outside the genre to bring a sense of melancholy, despair, triumph, anger and agony. ‘Veneration’ is a soaring and plunging experience of emotional tumult.
More info: Vircolac; Dark Descent Records; Sepulchral Voice Records;