Saarkoth will release Terra Mortua on 4 December with no label behind it. "Scribes Of Death" is out ahead of it as a lyric video.
The seven titles read as a sequence rather than a list: "Destroyers of Worlds", "Condemned to Damnation", "Gaias Children", "Scribes of Death", "Fire, Flood, Drought, Death", the title track and "Hiraeth". Terra Mortua is dead earth, and hiraeth is the Welsh word for longing after a place you cannot return to, which is a pointed thing to put at the end of a record about the planet being destroyed.
Melodic black metal out of England has had a thin time of it, overshadowed by the Scandinavian version for thirty years, and a band doing it from Lichfield without a label is working against both facts at once.
They formed in 2016 and have five releases out, two of them albums. This is the third, and the first they have dated this far ahead: 4 December leaves six weeks between the announcement and the record, which for a band working alone is six weeks of doing the label's job themselves.