Of all the new bands entering the world right now, there are few that we are as excited about as Umbra Vitae, the death-metal supergroup featuring Converge and Wear Your Wounds frontman Jacob Bannon along with his WYW bandmates, guitarists Sean Martin (Twitching Tongues, ex-Hatebreed) and Mike McKenzie (the Red Chord, Stomach Earth), as well as bassist Greg Weeks (the Red Chord) and drummer Jon Rice (Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, ex-Job for a Cowboy). In late March, we premiered their ferocious debut single "Return to Zero," and today (April 15th) the band has resurfaced with a new cut and their first-ever music video, the aptly titled "Mantra of Madness." Check it out above.
"I absolutely adore being in Converge — it's been a part of the fabric of my being since I was a kid," Bannon told us of Umbra Vitae. "I've spent more than half my life in it. But it's also not really a metal band, although it has metal leanings at times and it's hyper-aggressive. This is the closest thing I've done that's rooted in more traditional death metal, at least in terms of speed and ferocity and heaviness."
The band — which takes its name from a poem by Georg Heym, first published in 1912 — are gearing up to drop their 10-song debut LP, Shadow of Life, digitally on May 1st on Bannon's own Deathwish Inc. You can pre-order it here.
