Te Deum have released "Funeral Song", the song that opens Gates to the Unknown, their fourth album, out on 20 November through Moon Records.
Four albums in thirty one years is the arithmetic of a band that kept stopping. The Kyiv group formed in 1995, put out a demo in 1996, a debut in 1999 and a second record in 2002, and then went quiet for twenty years, with line up changes and long inactivity. The third album arrived in November 2022.
What that year means for a Ukrainian band needs no elaboration, and the band do not elaborate either: they say the record reflects the despair around them, and leave it at that. Nine songs, heavy guitar tone, slow melodies, mortality as the subject from the first track title onward.
The sound they built in the late nineties, death metal weight with melancholic arrangements and keyboards underneath, is the one still in use here. Thirty one years is long enough for that to count as a house style rather than a period influence.