The Foreshadowing have released Ozymandias, the title track and second song out from their new album. Ozymandias arrives on 20 November through Lifeforce Records, nine tracks.
The title comes from Shelley, whose sonnet is about a ruined statue in a desert and the king who thought it would outlast him. The band have turned the fallen empire into something smaller and worse: the band's own line is that artists, voices, memories and the songs we once made become fragments of a fading emotional civilization, buried beneath time, silence and sand.
Two names on the credits say where the record sits. Dan Swano mixed and mastered it, and Bunker Artworks, whose list runs through Katatonia, Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, made the artwork. That is the European gothic doom establishment, assembled deliberately.
The band say the album keeps the introspective side of what they do but leans harder on hope and inner strength than their earlier records did, which for a band two decades into gothic doom is a direction rather than a retreat.
They formed in Rome in 2005 and this is their second record for Lifeforce, after New Wave Order in 2024. Marco Benevento has sung for them from the start, and the clean voice is still the thing the arrangements are built around.