Hear Doom Trio In the Company of Serpents' Mammoth New Song "Nod to Destiny" | Revolver

Hear Doom Trio In the Company of Serpents' Mammoth New Song "Nod to Destiny"

Band's Grant Netzorg: "Divinity gets what it wants, and often comes barring fangs"
itcos_press_2020_credit_colleen-donley.jpg, Colleen Donley
photograph by Colleen Donley

Since 2011, Denver trio In the Company of Serpents have been serving up tectonic slabs of thunderous doom and spacey drone. Today, the trio has teamed up with Revolver to premiere their cataclysmic new track "The Chasm at the Mouth of the All." Blast it below.

The song hails from their forthcoming album Lux, which is due May 5th (you can pre-order it now via Bandcamp) and features guest appearances by Primitive Man's Ethan Lee McCarthy and Khemmis' Ben Hutcherson. Over the course of eight tracks, the LP "focuses on the notion of a Prima Materia, or a fundamental root essence, behind everything in the manifest universe," according to the band.

Speaking on the story behind "The Chasm at the Mouth of the All," In the Company of Serpents vocalist-guitarist Grant Netzorg offers up a deep explanation. "The title and opening lyrics are a nod to destiny — Divinity gets what it wants, and often comes barring fangs," he says. "The overarching theme of Prima Materia and the 'All is Sound/All is Mind/All is Light' are at play here. The title of the song, and the opening lyric, 'We live in chasm at the mouth of the all,' is meant to confer that we live in an embodied, living universe, or God, if you will. The second line, 'Her lips are wet with venom and her quarry will fal,' is both a homage to a vinyl-only bonus track from one of my all-time favorite records, SunnO))) and Boris' Altar, as well as an assertion that, if we live in an embodied universe and it is all of God, God gets what it wants."

He continues, "There are other themes at play as well here: In the second verse we have the lines, 'The sky above is the celestial womb/The soil beneath us the seed and our tomb." This is playing with a Nuit/Hadit dynamic from Crowley's infamous Book of the Law, which he posited he had received telepathically from an angelic entity after performing the Headless Rite from the Greek Magical Papyri in the chamber of the great pyramid.

"The themes of sex/life/death are all fairly intertwined here, and this could function thematically as a sibling of the earlier tune, 'Scales of Maat.' On that same theme, we all know that our journeys will end in death, and the reality is we must navigate that. In Qabalah, the sephira, Binah, is associated crossing the void of death, and one of its alternate titles is 'The Great Sea' and this is what I'm referencing in the lyric, 'Born unto the universe, The Great Sea we must traverse.' I've since come to realize that themes of life and death are utterly intertwined for me and this record.

"One rather unsettling example of this is that, on the day (and probably down to the hour) that we finished recording this album, we unexpectedly lost my wife's father. The later track, 'Nightfall,' on which my friend Paul Primus once again performs Viola D'Amore, was used during the memorial service, and is thematically about death and the ends of cycles."