Venom Prison have returned with the lethal new single Judges Of The Underworld. The track marks the Welsh death metallers' first release from their upcoming new album Erebos, scheduled to arrive February 4, 2022.
The song, which is available now, arrives with a music video that is scheduled to air at 5pm GMT today (Nov 04). It was directed and produced by Thomas Coe Brooker with Venom Prison's vocalist Larissa Stupar.
In a joint statement speaking of the hard-hitting new track, the band explain, "Judges Of The Underworld deals with the crippling reality of people who face incarceration, who oftentimes are followed by violence over a lifetime.
"This violence can present itself as a dominating factor in a context of structural poverty and racial inequality, creating roles in an individual’s life where they are not only the victim, but also witness and offender at different times in different situations.
"But the violence we address in our courts and prisons is judged out of social context and can therefore not lead to a fair and personalised resolution for people who are stuck in a cycle of violence and systematic oppression."
Elaborating on the accompanying music video, they continue, "It was important for us to visualise this feeling of isolation, anxiety, and repeated violence in the music video for Judges Of The Underworld and the idea was to show an individual that is stripped down to their basic needs and instincts.
"Consumed by their helplessness to navigate in an everyday situation, feeling isolated within themselves whilst going under in a sea of people that face similar conditions. This is where Thomas Coe Brooker comes in as a director and cinematographer, with his unique eye for detail he was able to bring out this combative helplessness and aggressiveness of said individual.
"He was able to convey the feeling of being alone in a crowd, suffering the same fate as many others, where isolation becomes your existence and a vicious cycle of your life at the hands of systematic violence.”
In a recent chat with Metal Hammer, vocalist Larissa Stupar delved into the making of the forthcoming new record. "We might only have been a band for six years, but I think we’ve grown up a lot in that time and it shows in our music – I really hope people take that away from this album" she explains. "We don’t always want to play one kind of music – we’re doing as much as we can, in the way we want to."
Opening up about the circumstances that lead to Venom Prison's formation in 2015, she says "I didn’t plan to make music when I left Wolfxdown because I was so disappointed in the people I’d been playing with. The main reason I left was because the drummer and I dated, we were together for eight years and it was a really abusive and toxic relationship. After we split up he continued to be awful and more toxic than ever so that I couldn’t enjoy playing any more.
"There was also a lot of sexism and misogyny from certain members, so I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to play – I figured I’d be fine taking a break. Ash [Gray, VP guitarist] and I were living together because he’d moved to Germany and worked in Cologne. We’d both just left bands and decided to play together just so we could do shows again, so we sat and recorded the Venom Prison EP Defy The Tyrant.
"We struggled to find other band members and Ash really wanted to move back to the UK as he wasn’t enjoying living in Germany, I wanted to study in the UK anyway so we decided to come over and met our other members here."
Watch the video for Judges Of The Underworld below:
