Urna have put The Great Jihad online in full, four days before ATMF releases it on 16 October. Invisible Oranges is hosting the stream.
Thirteen years is the number that makes this a story. Mors Principium Est came out in 2013 and nothing followed it until now, which for a band from Cagliari working in black and funeral doom is long enough for an audience to disperse and reassemble around the back catalogue instead.
It is their fifth album and the fourth that ATMF, the Sardinian label whose full name is Aeternitas Tenebrarum Musicae Fundamentum, has been involved with. The band formed in 2003 and the discography since then is short and widely spaced: Sepulcrum in 2006, Iter ad Lucem in 2009, then 2013, then this.
Putting a whole funeral doom record up before release is a choice about how it is meant to be heard. Nothing in this music declares itself inside thirty seconds, and a premiere of one track would have said less than the stream does.