It’s a tad ironic to call any band the “most influential” anything, especially when that band has built its mythology on rejecting the premise of influence altogether. Yet here we are. Mayhem, the group that essentially invented non-metaphorically dangerous music, are releasing their seventh studio album, Liturgy of Death, on February 6, 2026. European headlining tour kicks off on February 5, 2026.
This is the part where most bands would say something like, “We’ve evolved.” But evolution is for organisms trying not to die. Mayhem has always been more interested in the dying part. Forty-one years into whatever this is, career, legacy, cultural infection, Mayhem has decided to stare in the direction of the one universal truth no one gets to “metal” their way out of: Everyone stops breathing eventually. So that’s the theme: Death as an unavoidable appointment. Liturgy of Death is the sound of realizing there’s no exit, and then refusing to blink.
Watch the video for the new single, “Weep for Nothing,” which is essentially a hymn for the moment you recognize that grief has no cosmic purpose. It’s bleak, fast, sharp, and cold, the sonic equivalent of fogged breath on a window that will outlast the person who made it.
Tracklist, which reads less like song titles and more like chapter headings in a book you find in a locked drawer:
01) Ephemeral Eternity
02) Despair
03) Weep for Nothing
04) Aeon’s End
05) Funeral of Existence
06) Realm of Endless Misery
07) Propitious Death
08) The Sentence of Absolution
09) Life Is a Corpse You Drag (Bonus Track)
10) Sancta Mendacia (Bonus Track)
If you’re the kind of person who alphabetizes your vinyl shelf by emotional devastation, there are multiple ways to own this record:
- The Deluxe Box Set, which comes with a special tarot card, because even nihilism benefits from aesthetics.
- A variety of Limited Gatefold Vinyl variants, all of which are black-something-marble-something because death is never a solid color.
- CD editions for the people who understand permanence is a lie but still refuse to stream.
- Digital, for those who believe music is a vapor and are comfortable with that.
- (We could list them all, but at some point you’ll recognize that choosing a color is just choosing the mood you’d like your existential dread delivered in.)
The lineup, Attila, Ghul, Hellhammer, Necrobutcher, and Morten, is locked in with the sort of chemistry forged by shared history, mutual trust, and the memory of having once existed inside a tabloid-fueled cultural apocalypse.
Liturgy of Death doesn’t reinvent Mayhem. It doesn’t need to. It clarifies them. It is Mayhem at their most present: merciless, unrelenting, vital. A reminder that black metal didn’t start as an aesthetic. It started as a dare. And Mayhem is still the band that takes the dare.
Feature Image Photo Credit: Agnes Köhler, Nima Taheri, Joyce Van Doorn // Editing by: Daniele Valeriani
