Fatum Aeternum have released As Above So Below, their first new music in three years and the first with a line-up of six. It is self produced and out digitally.
What the new size buys them is strings that belong to the band rather than to a session budget. Electric violin and cello carry the melodies against the riffing, and the vocals are split between a deep male voice and a whispered female one, which is the arrangement gothic metal has used for thirty years and which works whenever the two parts are actually written against each other.
The title is the hermetic axiom, and the song uses it as an instruction rather than an ornament: accept the light and the dark both. The words move from ideological anger to synthetic consumer culture, which is a wider target than the genre usually picks.
Three years of silence from a band two decades old normally means the end. Instead there are more singles promised and Israeli dates in the coming months, which for a band at this size is the only way back.