Australia’s post-metal/sludge legends, Lo! released their third full length album, Vestigial late last year via Pelagic Records.
Today the band have released a striking new video for the track, Gods Of Ruin.
The concept for the video was conceived by Lo! guitarist Carl Whitbread and bassist Adrian Shapiro wanting to find a unique and interesting way to use live footage in one of their music videos.
The base footage was shot by a friend of the band in Romania while on tour there in October 2017. It’s a single shot and is a great representation of a Lo! live show! All the visual effects were completed by Carl over a painstaking couple of months. All hand tracked with lots of love!
Vocalist Sam Dillon says “Gods Of Ruin is a take on the American phenomena of mass gun ownership and the tragic reality of an armed population triggered constantly by fear and ignorance. We become a flood of bullets now“.
The songs comprising Vestigial are truly next level. Well-crafted with a larger scope both musically and thematically than previous outings the band is simply tighter than ever before boasting a sound that’s seismically heavy yet organic with a mammoth harmonic density behind their stupefying heavy riffs.
“Lo! have come to remind you of glorious times, times when Mastodon were using samples of Jurassic Park to kick off their records”, Metal Hammer (UK) wrote about the band’s debut album LOOK AND BEHOLD. And in fact, song titles like MEGAFAUNA or HALL OF EXTINCT MAMMALS show that Lo! have always been interested in man’s relationship with the natural world.
Themes of extinction, circuses and animal exploitation were explored on the band’s 2015 EP THE TONGUELESS — “…so it was a nice lead in to where we are at now on VESTIGIAL, with a revisit of the outro from the EP as the intro on Album 3”, vocalist Sam Dillon comments.
A world where politics resemble black comedies, where guns have become an aspect of culture and where addiction to technology is the norm is at the lyrical heart of VESTIGIAL. “There are several repeated characters throughout the album; the JUDAS STEER, the LOCUST CHRIST… these are anti heroes, the wolves among sheep figuratively. The ghastly Donald Trumps, The Kim Jong-Un’s, the extremists and ignorant tyrants of our modern lives”, comments Dillon.
