PHOBOCOSM Foreordained [CD]

Montréal’s Phobocosm continue their career-spanning collaboration with Dark Descent Records with third full-length Foreordained. Foreordained is an amalgamation of everything that came before it. A perfectly balanced fusion of the murky death metal depravity of debut Deprived, blended with the devastating doom of Bringer Of Drought. Remarkably, this was the plan all along: “When we wrote Deprived, we decided that our first three albums would be a trilogy, so Foreordained is the last chapter of that trilogy. We made a conscious effort to pace all three albums in a similar manner, since we wanted them to be linked – starting with a slow, crushing doom song and concluding with a long, epic, depressive one. It’s not a coincidence,” reveals guitarist Samuel Dufour.

As their genre of choice would suggest, Foreordained’s lyrical concepts are about death, as well as the futility of denying one’s inherent mortality. Hence the name of the album; meaning predestined, inevitable… “Since death is unavoidable, the end of all life and of our planet is also unavoidable, so there are apocalyptic themes also. The closer ‘For An Aeon’ is about a possible way the world as we know it could end.”

Wrapped in artwork by the inimitable Lauri Laaksonen of Desolate Shrine, Convocation and Pestilent Hex fame, Foreordained is set to be a 2023 death metal highlight.