WITHERSCAPE, the new dark metal outfit formed by Swedish singer, multi-instrumentalist and producer extraordinaire Dan Swanö, together with fellow Swedish multi-instrumentalist Ragnar Widerberg, will be releasing their debut album, The Inheritance, on July 29th in Europe and August 6th in North America via Century Media Records. Today, the official lyric video for the track “Dead For A Day” was released and can be viewed below.
The cover artwork for The Inheritance, which can be seen below, was created by Travis Smith of Seempieces, who has previously worked with such bands as OPETH, NEVERMORE, DEATH and more.
Commented Swanö: “‘Dead For A Day’ is one of those songs that just wrote itself. I was strumming on the acoustic guitar one morning and it just poured out of my fingers. At first, I had no idea what to do with the song since I felt it was perhaps a bit too commercial for WITHERSCAPE, but after I played the demo to Ragnar, he insisted that it must be on the album!”
He adds: I love how the song moves between the mellow verses à la ‘Crimson I’ and ‘II’ to the more brutal, yet melodic chorus, in the tradition of ‘Uncreation’ and ‘Twilight’ through the groovy but ‘undanceable’ 9/8 section that leads to one of Ragnar’s best guitar leads of the album.”
The Inheritance is a pretty thick concept album split into different episodes and very briefly, the WITHERSCAPE story takes place in a remote village in northern Sweden in the late 1800’s. The central character lives in Stockholm and comes from wealth, and upon the death of his family he’s informed by the family lawyer that he has inherited a large estate up north. Having been oblivious to the estate’s existence, he decides to investigate, and once he’s there “all kinds of weird shit happens,” according to Swanö.
Swanö states: “Both me and Ragnar are fascinated by old, abandoned buildings and it was pretty clear from the start that we would have the estate our main character inherits on the albumcover. We used Travis Smith as a ‘medium’ for our visual ideas and he did a spectacular job transforming our written wishes into a real image.”
The Inheritance track listing:
1. Mother Of The Soul
2. Astrid Falls
3. Dead For A Day
4. Dying For The Sun
5. To The Calling Of Blood And Dreams
6 .The Math Of The Myth
7. Crawling From Validity
8 .The Wedlock Observation
9. The Inheritance
