Inspired by dark themes about ancient gods, religions, rituals and sacrifices, but also myths and cosmogony, “RITUALS”, the new EP from Avignon, France based post metallers WE ARE CURSED is live now in its full glory, and to celebrate, we have teamed up with the band to give you their first hand rundown of each and every track below.
Can you hear the spells growing from the darkness?
The fall
This is about a summerian mythologie. Enlil is the evil clone of Enki, son of An himself son of Tiamat, goddess and mother of all. Because of its disproportionate ego and deceit he decides to make war and kill Tiamat to pleased An and to become the equal of Enki.
This song is called “the fall” for 2 reasons.
1- Tiamat is destined to die.
2- With is behavior Enlil reach the point of no return.
4400
4400 is a number of sacrificed people in Aztec culture during a four days celebration. This number is a symbol of what human can do for the gods he believes in. Madness often leads the faith ….
First ages
The beginning of everything for the ancient nordic culture. From nothing to everything. From gods reign to concrete grass, sand, trees …. This is always about renewal.
Susanoo
Susanoo is one of the early gods in Japanese traditional mythology. He is the god of storm and have multiple faces.He is a jealous god, and fights with members of his family, trying to monopolize heaven and hell for himself. The second part of this title is like the storm himself : fast and nervous !
Wi-nteko-wa
This legend comes from the Algonquian indian tribes, the actual south Ontario Canada.
In Algonquian language it means malevolent spirit, cannibalistic monster, the wendigo.
An evil spirit of the forest take possession of a man.
when the wendigo runs the woods every animals hide and if a man goes by he’ll be devoured. Even the wolverines fear him.
You can meet someone possessed without knowing it. He will seem like a good person to you but at the end you ‘ ll die.
The curse of the wendigo is endless, when the possessed man dies the spirit will take an other person. And on and on…
We are cursed
with lyrics by Golem Mecanique
Golem Mecanique comments: “The proposal to collaborate with We are Cursed was doubly appreciable both by my joy for this opportunity to return to a more ferocious singing but also by this bias of the curse, of the invisible to be apprehended by the sound. For this collaboration I invoked the Haitian voodoo forces. The heaviness of the instruments, the long and low march of the sound could only respond to entities hidden at the crossroads of our lives ready to twist us at the first misstep.”
We wanted to collaborate with Golem Mecanique because we knew the kind of voice she has : something between vanishing incantations and inevitable bewitchment. David already used to work with her in the past, and when the instrumental part was finished, that was clear the title was made for this collaboration. We let her do all what she wanted to do, and the first shoot she send to us was perfect.
Speaking about the video, the bands comments: “We made the music video clip by ourselves, as anything we make. This is a puzzle made from archive videos about desolation, chaos, fear …. The process itself is very interesting, because we need to spend a lot of time searching for perfect sequences of a film. Sometimes we just pick 5 seconds from 50 minutes or more, discovering some treasures. Our favorite sources are early documentaries, because of the realness of the pictures.
Despite the multiple and various sources the pictures are taken from, there are some parts where a narrative frame surprisingly comes out of this patchwork. So we let it go its way…”
El Racoon and Marc Sicard adds their take on the bleak artwork:
“We are cursed Deep, strange, lore-driven: key words abound when looking for influences to draw something for We Are Cursed. Looking into ancient symbols and figures, strange scenes arose, trying to evoke the kind of deep menace that the music inspire. But how to represent that? How to represent a chilling laugh in the mist, a dreaded presence in the shadows… a grin in the dark? And there it was.”
“El Raccoon transformed Marc’s drawing into a linocut which was printed by hand to give the artwork a unique and imperfect effect.”
