UK black metallers The Infernal Sea discuss their plague-infested new album

Features
By ( Metal Hammer ) published

Watch the band's two-part track-by-track narrative of The Great Mortality

The Infernal Sea promo picture

Plagues and black metal have a long supremely fetid history, from Darkthrone’s Plaguewielder through countless acts casting a pox on humanity to 1349, named after the year the Black Death made its way to Norway.

Documenting England’s experience of huge egg-like tumours, necrotised flesh, bloody vomit and towns full of stinking corpses, Fenlands black metallers The Infernal Sea have produced a suitably ravaging in the album in the form of The Great Mortality. Released last February by the resurrected cult label, Cacophonous Records, it’s a blackened-knuckle ride that takes in moment of sweeping grandeur, icy, Nordic-style diatribes and charged, blast-ridden grooves, all with the unwavering focus of an amphetamine-fuelled angel of death.

Having offered up further proof that British black metal is a resurgent force, The Infernal Sea are now offering further insight into The Great Mortality, with an enlightening, two-part track-by-track commentary spelling out the spread of the Black Death through the album’s narrative. Expect tales of appetite-ruining putrefaction, religious fanaticism and numerous atrocities perpetrated by said fanatics. So if you’re sitting comfortably, don’t expect that to last and enter the world of The Great Mortality below!

Check out The Infernal Sea’s Facebook page here

And order The Great Mortality here!

Jonathan Selzer
Jonathan Selzer

Having freelanced regularly for the Melody Maker and Kerrang!, and edited the extreme metal monthly, Terrorizer, for seven years, Jonathan is now the overseer of all the album and live reviews in Metal Hammer. Bemoans his obsolete superpower of being invisible to Routemaster bus conductors, finds men without sideburns slightly circumspect, and thinks songs that aren’t about Satan, swords or witches are a bit silly.