Imperial Triumphant live up to their avant-garde reputation with new track Merkurius Gilded, which features smooth jazz star Kenny G complete with appropriate costume.
The piece also includes G’s son Max, who’s an established guitar shredder in his own rite.
“What once was a gilded age of industry and exceptional growth [is now] stricken with panic that shall leave the common man in the dust, dried up and faded away,” the band said of the track. “Merkurius looks down upon 42nd Street mobs releasing their fortunes into the sky of ignorance.”
“We're not a jazz band, by any means,” vocalist-guitarist Ilya Ezrin told Hammer in 2020. “We do play jazz – especially my rhythm section, they’ve been in the jazz scene for 15 or 20 years.
“But we’re all metalheads. We’ve all played in other metal bands before this. Imperial Triumphant started out as a much more straightforward metal band. But how we developed wasn’t so much of a pre-planned idea. It just kind of seeped in.”
Asked if the band’s music really was organised chaos, he replied: “Absolutely. It’s something we’ve honed over the years by playing hundreds of gigs, and rehearsing even more times. When we play together, there is that controlled chaos – there may not be a set bpm or tempo, it may oscillate, it might change.”
He added that the aimed to deliver a sound that’s “luxurious and mysterious” with a “dark elegance,” concluding: “Something that gives you a little taste and makes you want more.”
Merkurius Gilded appears on upcoming album The Spirit Of Ecstasy, which arrives on July 22 via Century Media.
