Suffer Divine is a love letter to melodic death metal. While it stays true to our core sound, it also pushes the sound of our band forward with precision focus. It has so many dense layers; we’re very excited for listeners to get to know it and really dig into it.
Sonically, this album it is the fruition of our continuous mission to compose melodic, progressive, aggressive, truthfully honest death metal / metal core.
It’s central theme lyrically is the idea that one can derive worth, meaning, fuel, and even direction from the act of suffering. It challenges the ideas of what true strength and weakness is. It explores the space between pain and suffering with idea being that pain is reactionary and suffering something that can be controlled and even conquered.
1. All Cruelty Springs from Weakness
I love this little intro because while it doesn’t have any words, music, and as many as 1 note it still says a lot. Its title alone gets the listener thinking: “what is true strength, what is true weakness.” It sets the stage for an audio onslaught and puts our most defining feature as a band (johns iconic scream) center stage to build the mood that opens the record.
2. Gods of Decay:
A straight up melodic death metal song, Gods of Decay opens this album with blistering intensity. We wanted to hit everyone over the head as soon as the album kicked in. All these songs were composed with the live show in mind, and this song feels like the perfect way to set the state.
Lyrically this song addresses the curse of nostalgia, the ghost of the past, the long shadow your legacy, life, and the struggle to be forever moving forward, forever creating new memories, adventures, relationships, and joy.
3. No Conquered Hearts
With this track we begin to see the melodic side of the album take shape. Hidden beneath all this speed, aggression, and rage is pure passion. This song takes us on a rhythmic journey, both thrash metal AND progressive metal shine bright in this song and it features one of the best guitar solos on the record in my opinion.
Lyrically, this song is more of a love song then anything. It serves as a an emotive release and colors this album with a little bit of hope.
4. Salvation
Life is full of pain. How you process it is what shapes your entire being. You can let it overtake you and project it outwards onto others or you can eat it, use it as fuel, process it in a way that lets you grow. Do you wax or wane, do you bloom or rot. The choice is yours. This song explores this conceptually.
Sonically this song presents as the most vocally melodic on the record. We wanted to compose something that was unashamed of how classically melodic death metal it was. While some of the songs on this record really focus on their intensity, this song opens up a little so that the listener can dive into the melody and compositional depth that is on this record.
5. Suffer Divine
Lyrically, this song is for all the sadistic motherfuckers in this world who would normalize breaking down others to feed their insatiable egos. From world leaders to chronically online agitators, these cowards will elude accountability at any cost to further their mission of making this world as hate filled and divisive as possible. Go fuck yourselves.
A full on rip’r this song is mosh pit music. Written with the full intent to Insite mosh pits all over the world. While other songs on this record lean on our melodic side this one goes for the jugular and leans hard on our punk / hardcore tendencies. This song begins to show the other side to the balance that is on this record. The beautiful rage contained within.
6. Warrior
This song conceptually touches on the intrapersonal warrior. The battlefield between your ears. The war within. This song is about controlling your thoughts so that you can master your actions. Holding steady in the face of adversity and warrior spirit in us all.
Musically this song is a perfect example of the magic trick we are always trying to pull off compositionally. How do you make the listener feel nostalgic AND like they are hearing something super fresh at the same time? How do we sound like we are moving forward sonically but also who we have always been? This song is it, both musically forward thinking and undeniably classic Darkest Hour, all at the same time.
7. Vile Angel
This song is perfect blend of Melo-death, hardcore, punk, and guitar wizardry all rolled into one. We wanted to push the sound into a bit more progressive, tech metal world but also have a punk foundation.
Conceptually this is one of my favorite songs on the record because it touches on all of our struggles with addiction. Addiction can come in many shapes and can be disguised by ego, ambition, or even pain. If you grip anything to tight it can slip through your fingers, if you do anything to much it will follow you home.
8. The Unforgiving Hand
Inspired by our love for Pink Floyd, guitar, and breaking tradition, this song takes the listener on an unexpecting epic journey. We wanted to do something here that would break up the furiously of the record, something that would give this record balance and some musicality that we hadn’t touched on yet.
Conceptually it’s a dim light of hope inside these dark writings. Almost an epilog placed in the middle of the story, this song sort of skips to the future when one has seen the freedom in embracing their own suffering, wearing their scars with pride, and failures as experience.
9. Tribalist
A riff intense, progressively melodic, forward thinking, futuristic death metal song, Tribalist pushes the boundaries of this record. While other songs might stand on our punk and hardcore past, this song dives hard into our neo-classical influences and our lazer beam lead obsession. The melodic structure of this chorus is like nothing else on the record.
Lyrically, this song touches on one of the deepest infections in modern society, tribalism. It seems almost married to the human spirit, but we must reject this. We must reject the trappings of tribalism and look to a future where we see all of humanity as one tribe.
10. Everyday Horrors
Log into your life under surveillance. It’s not enough that they want to own your thoughts, they want you to be thankful for it. The ultimate form of control comes packaged in the illusion of choice. The freedom to decide who owns you. Take your life back from them. The ultimate form of rebellion is to unplug from this digital nightmare and breathe the air, drink the water, support yourself and your community, and think for yourself. We are the culture.
Musically this song sounds like if Darkest Hour slept on Exodus’ tour bus for a week. Highly inspired by our love for thrash this song goes harder into the punk crossover sound then we ever have before. That said it still fits in perfectly here second to last on the record and is one of the bands favorites no doubt.
11. A Story of Redemption
When we wrote this song, we knew it could easily be the album closer. A song that is more linier in structure then others on this album, Story really stands out. In some ways this song could be a Darkest Hour album, in one song. This is a style of DH song we love and one we use sparingly and often towards the ends of our records. They usually write themselves and this one did for sure.
John was playing around with ideas for this song lyrically and once we landed on the idea of it being more of a story flow it just clicked. Conceptually it askes the final questions of the album. What is the narrative about your life that you believe? You are the imagination of yourself. What does that say about where you are? Where you are going? Who is to blame? Who is in control? – and we leave the listener to decide / explore these answers for themselves.
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