The Foreshadowing have released Ozymandias, the title track and second song from the album of the same name, out on 20 November through Lifeforce Records.
Shelley's sonnet is about a king whose monument has fallen apart in the desert, and almost every band who borrows it uses it the same way, as a line about empires. This one moves it somewhere less obvious. The ruin here is human creativity turning to dust: artists, voices, memories and the songs people made, all of it becoming fragments of what the band call a fading emotional civilisation.
That is a bleaker reading than the usual one, because a collapsed empire at least leaves stones behind. What the song describes is the disappearance of the wanting to make anything at all.
It does not end there. Somewhere in the ruins, the band say, a flame is still burning, the memory of what we dared to feel. Twenty one years into a career spent at the gothic end of doom, the Italian band have earned the right to that ending without it sounding like a let off.