Abhoria have put out "Ambition and Delusion", the first song from a third album Black Lion Records will release in 2027, and the subject is James Gordon Bennett Jr., the publishing magnate who paid for a disastrous expedition to the North Pole.
The song is written from Bennett's side of it. What it examines is not the expedition but the reason for it: a man trying to convert public humiliation into heroism, with the money to try. That is a long way from the usual subjects of American black metal and a better one, because the delusion in the title is specific rather than atmospheric.
Musically it moves from mid paced dissonance into tremolo picking and then into blasting, with a progressive streak the earlier records kept in reserve. There is also a steel guitar interlude, played by the singer Ben Pitts, which in black metal is either a mistake or a decision, and the song is built so it reads as a decision.
Hunter Lamar directed the video, as he did for "The Well" in 2024, and shot the Bennett passages as silent cinema with title cards. The guitarist Trevor Portz traces the idea to seeing He Who Gets Slapped in a Californian revival house. Herbrand Larsen mixed it and Tony Lindgren mastered it at Fascination Street. The band are out with Velnias across the Southwest this month.