Swiss post-metallers Abraham unveil their new single “I Am the Vessel and the Vessel Is Me,” a complex, gargantuan effort that offers another glimpse into their new masterpiece’s kaleidoscopic chaos.
Their fifth studio album, the mighty idsungwussa, will be released September 26 via Pelagic Records and is the third and final chapter to a series of concept albums of truly epic proportions.
Still staged in the gritty atmosphere and philosophical weight of post-metal, sludge, and ambient noise, idsungwussa sees Abraham march even further into dissonant and defiant territory.
“The three albums are clearly linked together thematically,” the band comment, “although, rather than an additional chapter, idsungwussa is more like a parallel narrative to Debris de mondes perdus. The latter was a jump in time after Look, Here Comes the Dark!, whereas idsungwussa is a jump in space, a journey away from Earth. It should be the final piece of this little jolly ride.”
This album isn’t just heavy – it is absolutely drenched in delicious filth, and yet by embracing even more the melodic interludes and melancholic passages, they create a devastating contrast to the wall of power coming from stacked guitars, catastrophic drums, and raging, sharp vocals delivered in Swiss-German dialect.
“The album was recorded between November 2024 and February 2025, all while handling our day jobs and in a period that was, on a personal level, not the easiest for some of us. It is only in the last two weeks of the recording process, right before sending it out to mixing, that it sort of came together and started to feel like a coherent album, an album that we could be happy and proud about. For an album with change/transformation as an underlying theme, this is sort of performative!”
This urgency and duress bleeds into every song, an hour-long journey that moves from the grim to sublime, from melancholy to raw destruction – evoking ruined civilizations and the last wails of fractured psyches. Yet there is something less bleakly human, more ethereal at moments, as if glimpsing beyond the constraints of the body and its wheel of flesh and death.
Strewn throughout the record are appearances of Farfisa Louvre organ – prominently featuring on an Abraham album for the first time. The band were also joined by Kevin Galland (Coilguns), who added additional Moog and piano parts.
The band continues, “Our approach to recording guitars was different than what we did before. Instead of having one guitar on the left playing a part and one on the right playing another part, we decided that left and right guitars were to play the same part, and the center guitar was to play another part. We just stacked more guitars whenever we needed. And oh did we use a lot of reverb, too!”
The structures and movements of the songs found within idsungwussa are unique and fresh. A balancing of themes and emotions that is both intoxicating and unsettling, it is an immersive journey that rewards deep listening and challenges the boundaries of genre. From the patient grandeur of coming extinction, to the chaos and fevered urgency of the aftermath, in idsungwussa Abraham move forward from prophetic lamentation to an elegiac visceral response. The emotional closure of this expression is felt, something final that will leave you speechless and with only one real option; listen to it again.
