Extol have put out "Merciless Hunger" from Aura of Decay, the album Solid State Records have for 6 November and their first since 2013. It is the crudest thing they have released in a while and the subject is specific: what happens when belief becomes a method of control.
"It is a warning against those who seek to usurp the beliefs of others," the band say, "cloaking their hunger for power in a language of love, truth, and sacred justice." Coming from this band that sentence carries more weight than it would from most: Extol have written about faith seriously for thirty years, from inside it rather than at it, which is why a song about people who weaponise it is not the easy target it looks like.
Musically it sits between thrash and black metal, with the technical writing still underneath the noise. Jens Bogren mixed and mastered it at Fascination Street, and the recording was split across three studios.
They formed in the early nineties, alongside the Norwegian black metal underground and against a mainstream of nu metal and post grunge, and have never sounded like either.