Annihilus Mundi have released The Dead Sea Scrolls, their second album, with no label behind it. Thirteen songs and seventy seven minutes.
The frame is Neon Genesis Evangelion, Hideaki Anno's 1995 series and the film that followed it in 1997, and the useful thing is what Daniel Saillant does not do with it. He does not retell the plot. He takes what the series is about and uses it to look at his own life, which is how a concept record avoids becoming a summary of somebody else's work.
He is direct about why. The album followed him across some of the most difficult and transformative parts of his life, he says, and what started as a straightforward concept turned into something considerably more personal as the world around it changed. He hopes it reaches people carrying the same kind of weight.
Saillant started the project in 2018 and has never kept it inside one genre. Progressive death metal is the base, with shoegaze and progressive rock running through it, clean singing against harsh vocals, and Cynic, Deafheaven and Dream Theater as the markers he offers himself.