FEN announce new album & release first video single
Архив новостей | Русская версия
While our minds prefer to imagine that we stand on solid ground, in truth a churning maelstrom of molten metal and rock rotates below our earth's crust - just as our emotions hide beneath the skin. FEN are unleashing this primordial force in their harsh track 'Tectonic', which has been chosen as the first advance single to be taken from the East Anglian post-black metal stalwarts' new album: "Elemental Part One: Mourning Earth", which is scheduled for release on August 21, 2026.
FEN present 'Tectonic' in the shape of an allegoric and highly symbolic music video, which is available here.
FEN comment: "As the primordial spheroid of the earth cooled, the crust shifted and solidified – the colossal movement of tectonic plates underpins all that we know", mastermind Frank "The Watcher" Allain writes. "With 'Tectonic' we seek to explore this foundational ebb and flow, a brutal pulse that with one mere twitch, can wreak destruction upon the fragile leavings of our civilisation. And so does our inner self – a primordial, malformed kernel that lurks within, yearning to manifest as something with meaning, something with purpose. To know this can never happen – that true meaning and purpose will forever elude us – is a fundamental source of dissonance, bursting forth in volcanic rage and existential despair. This piece is one of the more direct songs within 'Mourning Earth'; pulsing and surging with strident anger, heaving riffs and moments of pure, wordless anguish."
Tracklist
1. Glacier
2. Tectonic
3. Massif
4. Abyssal Plain
5. Barrow
6. Moor
It is quite a paradox, FEN are climbing to a new artistic height by coming down to earth with their eighth full-length "Elemental Part One: Mourning Earth". The East Anglian trio has turned to their 'roots' in every sense, by distilling the true essence of what constitutes their sound through everything that they have learned and added in the last two decades.
Realising that they had reached their twentieth 'full' year, FEN set out to encapsulate the full expanse of their sound as well as the whole width of their stylistic range. As a result, "Mourning Earth" can be described as a marriage of their first and last releases, via the waypoint of "Winter". Musically, the focus is on the emotive textures and cinematic aspects of the songs.
While the previous album, "Monuments to Absence" (2023), was deliberately arranged dense, fast and intense, FEN decided to leave breathing space on this album to allow more time for themes and ideas to exhale and unfurl. Of course, there is still much sonic aggression but channelled differently as large parts of "Mourning Earth" were recorded live to allow an organic nature to flow, and to permit the natural rhythms of the pieces to develop.
FEN's rhythm section actively moved away from the blast and double-kick heavy approach in order to concentrate on more dynamic drum patterns, experimenting with accents and feel. Challenging bass lines interweave around the percussion whilst simultaneously counterpointing the guitar layers.
Lyrically, FEN sum up their basic idea behind "Elemental Part One: Mourning Earth" in their own poetic words: "The morning mists clearing over the boggy expanses of the fens to reveal another grey, gloom-laden day of sorrow and regret. And at twilight, the slow, sad realisation that tomorrow promises only more of the same – tormented by the half-heard whispers of the spirits bound to the soils, our pain continues. And we can only endure."
In this context, it is noteworthy that "Mourning Earth" is the first part of a two album concept with the second part already quite formed both conceptually and musically in the artist's mind. In that sense, the "Elemental" diptych is undoubtedly the biggest project FEN have undertaken so far.
The colour of a FEN album always provides a dead giveaway to its conceptual and musical direction. The cover artwork of the East Anglians' eighth full-length features an abundance of the colour 'green', which further underlines its elemental earth bound content.
