Dutch death doom metal titans Asphyx have announced their overall tenth full-length effort, Necroceros, will be released on January 21st via Century Media Records. The follow-up to 2016’s Incoming Death was recorded at Tom Meier’s Tom Meier studio and Paul Baayens’ The Mörserstudio, and mixed and mastered by Sebastian “Seeb” Levermann at Greenman Studios. The group will release the first single and share more details on the new album early next month.
In the meantime read what frontman Martin van Drunen has to say about the upcoming record:
“The first recordings for ‘Necroceros’ started somewhere in November 2019. Mainly just rough ideas. We hired Tom’s studio for a couple of jam-sessions so we could record as soon as we thought something had potential. We finished about 6/7 songs, but after a few listenings we decided there still had quite some work to be done.
After the 3 previous albums and this one being ASPHYX’s 10th official full studio record we were very well aware that the standard had to be incredibly high. Our advantage was that for the first time we had a steady line-up. Since “Incoming Death” we were damned good “worked in” together, one “felt” what the other wanted or where he was music-wise going. With Paul having tons of riffs on the shelves, the earlier takes and the unexpected rapidly spreading Covid-19 outbreak and thus all our gigs being canceled one after the other, we booked Tom once more for a bunch of jam-recordings. Which turned out marvelously…
It took 2 weekends to finally arrange all songs and tape the drum-tracks. Going completely berserk while playing and being totally satisfied with the variety, rawness, brutality and dynamics of each particular track, we were 100% certain that we were heading in the right direction.
Long before all the above was happening, I already had introduced “Necroceros” as a working title. It came out spontaneously, sounded powerful and since we used the word “Death” in every release-title, so did “Necro”. The idea was a sci-fi fantasy entity on an eternal course, existing only to devour planets, turning universes into meaningless voids. And while the boys were laying guitars and bass over the drums I searched and wrote the themes and lyrics for every single track. And there we were…
To mix with Seeb was a shot in the dark, but he had told me one of his wishes was to ever be able to mix a Death Metal album for a band like ASPHYX. And since we wanted a fresh input, we gave him a chance by letting Seeb do a test and it fused simply excellent.
As always, we passed the working title on to Axel Hermann to skizz about and let him throw his morbid imagination over it with detailed bits and pieces. And once more he didn’t let us down with another brilliant masterpiece.
And here we are. Something old, something new, something krushing, something sparkling, something alcoholic, something genius, but all very, very ASPHYX!”
