Recent Headline Act Thaeia have released their new prog-metal concept album Datura Metel Vol 1. Out on May 28th, you can grab it or stream it from all the usual places including Spotify and Bandcamp.
The band’s singer, Jacopo, gives us a bit more information about the release:
It took two years and many trips around the world to write Datura Metel. We crossed freezing Iceland, through the wildest and most violent environment. Violent as the big metropolis, the same where we live day by day. A reality that we experience in Rome, where the most superficial appearances, chaos and selfishness reign unchallenged. We got lost both physically and mentally, some in the woods of Holland and some in an isolated place, by the sea. And here we have come to terms with ourselves. We decided to write everything, to write a story and bring it to life with music.
A story became a concept album, which narrates a path of rebirth, of purification through the most atrocious pain. The story is that of a man who, at the height of his despair and torn by the suffering of his ego, seeks revenge: a new life. So every day, slowly, he loses himself in a vortex of paranoia and self reflections that lead him to the realization of his own fragility.
He becomes aware of how much he feels insecure, enslaved and depressed in a society ruled by ignorance and wickedness.Each song tells his escalating madness. A crescendo of painful considerations about the life he led for too many years, slave to appearances and to his duties like work, sex and family.
Suddenly he’s reassured by some visions and voices. He hears some animal voices, the foxes who live in the woods. Following those voices he arrives at the entry of the forest, where he burns his clothes and he gives himself to these animals, realizing later that they have been demons all along. They showed him his real pure and primordial nature.Datura Metel Vol. I tells the first part of his path and it’s the first EP of the concept Thaeia wanted to bring to life, changing not only the line-up with two new guitarists (Francesco Capuani and Federico Tiero) but also style, merging the djent sounds that always have influenced the band with some of the peculiar nu-metal shades, especially on the vocal side. A wiser and more mature work, forged in the studio by the band and their producer Marco Mantovani, already present in the first album “Yugen”, who recorded the band at Forward Studios in Rome. Finally, the mastering has been entrusted to Ted Jensen of Sterling Sound in New York. A “mixing” legend who worked with such legendary bands as Korn, Deftones and Gojira. The original Album artwork, like the previous one, was created by the artist Fabio Timpanaro. It portrays a covered-face man, surrounded by foxes upon a Datura Metel flower’s field. This plant is known as “Devil’s Trumpet”, because of its hallucinogenic powers which in the past, especially in China, was utilized for “Honor Deaths”. Its brew, once ingested, creates heavy hallucinations, induces coma and, in the end, leads to eternal rest.