Apotheus have released "Key Keeper", the new single from The Complex Permutation, which the Portuguese band put out on 20 November as their fourth album.
The song runs on propulsive drumming through the verses and thickens into walls of guitar at the chorus, with Miguel Andrade singing lyrics about losing somebody. The band describe the subject more flatly than the arrangement does. "Sometimes holding the key doesn't mean you should open the door," they said. "Key Keeper is about carrying the power to change everything, while realizing that the hardest decision may be to leave everything exactly as it is."
The album carries a science fiction story the band wrote, published separately in text and in audio. It sets a unified entity called GODS against an ancient being called VOID, which wants to wipe out all life in order to put an end to suffering, and works outwards from there into free will, individuality and hope. The Far Star and Ergo Atlas were built the same way, so this is the third time the band have asked an audience to read along with a record.
Jorge Lopes recorded and mixed it at Redboxstudio and Acle Kahney of Tesseract mastered it. The quartet is Andrade, Tiago Santos on guitar, Daniel Rocha on bass and Albano von Hammer on drums.