Withered Land have released a video for Judol Smutku, which translates as Vale of Sorrow, the first song from Piesni Vietru. The third album from the Belarusian project runs to six tracks and about 37 minutes, and Immortal Frost Productions puts it out on 27 November.
The record is a single story told in order. A man leaves his past behind and walks where the wind takes him, through memory, hardship and the certainty of dying, and Judol Smutku is the chapter that starts him moving. Olga Kann, who is the whole project, directed and edited the video herself, with Maxberg 13 behind the camera.
Kann calls the idea behind it Slavic melancholy, and in her description it is specific rather than atmospheric: abandoned villages, paths grown over, houses coming apart, a landscape where people have already left. Black metal riffing carries it, with ambient stretches, bass tagelharpa and flutes, and a voice that moves between clean singing and a harsher one.
She plays almost all of it, as she did on The Endless Journey in 2021 and Hall of the Dead last year. Viachaslau Zima adds guitars, Shakh drums, and Astaroth Mercurius of Raventale engineered the record and sings on the closing track.