waaliteot_promotion | Astral Sleep

ASTRAL SLEEP presents:
We Are Already Living In The End Of Times
(Out on 21.4.2023 via Saarni Records)

With the previous album Astral Doom Musick (Saarni Records 2020), Astral Sleep established their accurate genre definition as the namesake of the said album. With the new, 4th full-length, the band continues to evolve within these musical terms, but this time with a direction towards more Doom and Gloom, less Astral and Magical. The new album’s gargantuan soundscape resonates the immensity of the apocalypse portrayed. Beneath the waves of crushing guitars, drums pound and bass churns, like volcanoes that erupt under oceans, and above glide the ethereal lead guitars and synths, as the powerful vocals shatter the skies and tremble the earth.

We Are Already Living In The End Of Times witnesses the apocalypse as it manifests, and explores the thoughts, feelings, and insights that unfold in the face of the Doom. Why did this happen? What can we do about it? How should we feel about it? Should we care? Does it even matter? The album takes it path through powerful scenes of destruction, loss, and despair, but also of deliverance, self-realization, and existential enlightenment.

The cover art for the album was made by the renowned artist Mark Cooper, an insanely talented designer of tons of album-covers. This epic piece depicts an apocalyptic event where the last concert ever to happen on earth is about to take place running on the last fumes of the broken-down factory.

The album contains six songs:

We Are Already Living In The End Of Times

Torment In Existence

Invisible Flesh

The Legacies

Time Is

Status Of The Soul

(Total album runtime 46:27)

Release schedule:

17. February 2023 the first single from the album releases on all streaming services. Album pre-order becomes available.

21. April 2023 the full album releases and is available for purchase in digital, CD, and vinyl formats. The second single is released in streaming services on the same date.

The remaining four songs from the album are each independently released in the streaming services on monthly basis, until the sixth song releases in August 2023.

“We Are Already Living in The End of Times” is the opening track of the eponymous 4th full-length studio album by Astral Sleep. The song explores the idea that the end, destruction, and death of the society and the world as we know it, are happening right now. We are all part of it. This idea is mirrored by the concepts of heaven and hell, as they are very popular human-made concepts that feed on the idolization of the past, abandonment of the present, and active degradation and neglect of things to come, the future.

Musically the song starts by testing the listeners’ endurance and patience in the vein of some classic sludge albums that really embrace the noise and the feedback. It is also a sonic equivalent of living in the modern times. The song eventually starts with riffs that could demolish buildings, in contrast to the haunting and vulnerable walls of vocal chants that preach the end. Eventually the song gets heavier, bigger, messier and noisier, until finally resolving into a complete noise chaos before fading into the emptiness.

Astral Sleep hails from Finland, Tellus. The group has wreaked havoc on the metal genre since 2005. Astral Sleep's music fuses various musical styles into an unique entity dubbed "Astral Doom Musick": The boundaries of different sub-genres of Doom are ripped apart, mingled with pieces of jazz, psych-rock, noise, and various styles of metal, and sown back together into the monstrosities that they are. Astral Sleep's mission is finding eternal bliss in the world on its inevitable trajectory towards Doom.

For Fans Of: YOB, Crowbar, Pallbearer, Solitude Aeturnus, David Lynch, Nobuo Uematsu