Mental Cruelty have released Ride Of The Valkyries with a video, and the song does not open the record. It closes it, together with an intro called Daemmerbruch, two weeks before Echoes Of A Forlorn Land arrives on 23 October.
Giving away the ending is a choice, and in deathcore it makes a certain sense: the finale is where the orchestration goes widest, and the symphonic half is what this band have been building out for several records rather than the breakdowns. Lukas Nicolai describes heroic atmosphere, bombastic orchestration and uplifting melodies, which is not a description of a breakdown.
The subject is the valkyries, the figures in Norse myth who carry the dead off a battlefield, which puts the album's last two tracks on the same ground the band's whole Zwielicht era has occupied.
Dariusz Szermanowicz directed the video, after work for Behemoth and Amon Amarth, and the band call it their most ambitious production yet. Hiring that particular director is itself a statement about which league a deathcore band from Germany thinks it is in.