Photo: Melinda Oswandel

Apocalyptica have announced their new album Cell-0 will arrive on January 10th via Silver Lining Music. The follow-up to 2015’s Shadowmaker will be much different as these cellists have gone back to their roots with an instrumental full-length LP. While this marks the group’s first album in nearly five years, it also marks their first instrumental effort in seventeen years. Cell-0 was produced by Apocalyptica, mixed by Andrew Scheps, and recorded at Sonic Pump Studios in Helsinki. 

The group commented:

“It is tough to express without lyrics, but in Cell-0, we found particles of our universe previously unknown to us.  Millions of notes combine to create music just as millions of cells combine to create life, and when you visualize the whole thing, similar patterns appear.” 

Earlier this year we asked Eicca Toppinen on their decision to not have any vocalists on their next album as he explained:

“I decided to change the concept because of the modern times. It has always been a big challenge to work on the singles which are related to the album especially when we have had featuring artists, there has been so many moving parts on the release timing and so on. Based on the timings of the other artists or their record companies or whatever. Actually, we have failed on many single releases because of that in the past. I think that our very hardcore fan base has been looking for a long time for an instrumental record. And we thought that okay, we do the album as instrumental Apocalyptica and then we’ll do a collaboration of songs as individual releases, as singles. Going back to the ’60s style, releasing singles song by song.

It doesn’t mean that we are not releasing any vocal tracks in the future, but they are not part of the album we’ve got. The album is an independent piece of art and then singles are independent. And then we can easier work the singles properly. For some albums we have had good singles coming out but when the record company sometimes, the time frame to work them has been too long. With Brent Smith for example, when we did “Not Strong Enough.” We ran into trouble when we decided to do the song, from that moment it took two years before it was time to release the single. And then Shinedown’s album was suddenly still alive. Nobody expected that and they were coming up with their seventh single and then their record label was like, “Okay, but you can’t go out on the radio in America with the song at the same time. We are releasing our own song.”

So we kind of fucked up a great song in a way. Okay, the song is played there but it didn’t do its job it was supposed to do. To avoid that, we decided okay, let’s take always the time to work every song properly. We are setting up collaborations for next year here as well.”

To celebrate Apocalyptica’s new album, these cellists have also premiered a video for the song “Ashes of the Modern World.” 

Watch the video directed by Ville Juurikkala below and pre-order the album here: