We're less than a month away from To Drink From the Night Itself, At the Gates' highly anticipated seventh album. The Swedes have shared two scorchers from the coming LP thus far (the title track and "A Stare Bound in Stone"); Now, they've dropped off yet another chugging song, "Daggers of Black Haze." Like the aforementioned cuts, it arrives accompanied by a dramatic music video. Directed by Costin Chioreanu, the black-and-white visual blends blurry performance footage with ominous shots of snakes, temples, warriors, and mystics.
"Daggers of Black Haze" represents the more progressive side of the new record," frontman Tomas Lindberg says of the track. "It has a lot of reference-points to our early back catalogue, both style wise, and the emotional setting. It is desperate and urgent, but still melancholic and epic. It is conceptually one of the cornerstones of the album. Driving home the point of the need for a war on apathy and the populistic forces that takes advantage of it. This is a fight against the abyss. A beacon for the importance of real art, real forms of expression, and importance of our understanding of our mutual cultural history."
All the morbid imagery in "Daggers of Black Haze" calls back to the song's transgressive nature, as Chioreanu points out. "The presence of the main character depicted on the newest At the Gates cover and artwork — Alcyoneus, the oldest hero among the giant warriors — is here as well. His bust was rebuilt for this video, but it got a new face; now his mouth is closed, and therefore, he is reduced to silence due to the new paradigms and the oppression's influence in art — yet, this character continues to defy the primitive human nature. The snake's symbol and the eternal temptation offered by the bestial side of the self are also present here, and they work hand in hand with the new Alcyoneus's image."
To Drink From the Night Itself hits shelves May 18th. Produced by Russ Russell (Napalm Death, Dimmu Borgir), it's their first full-length effort since 2014's At War With Reality.
