Fargo, Dakota’s PHOBOPHILIC have today shared Survive in Obscurity with an accompanying music video. Survive in Obscurity is the third single to be taken from the four-piece’s forthcoming debut album, Enveloping Absurdity, due for release via Prosthetic on September 16. Across PHOBOPHILIC’s first full-length the group explore philosophical schools of absurdist and existential thought against a backdrop of old school death metal.
WATCH THE MUSIC VIDEO FOR
SURVIVE IN OBSCURITY BELOW.
Listen to Survive in Obscurity via Apple Music, TIDAL, Deezer, Bandcamp and Spotify
Pre-order Enveloping Absurdity here.
Speaking on the single release and music video, the band comments: “Survive in Obscurity is about the evolution of living beings on earth and how consciousness is not an advantageous trait for survival. Humans are burdened with an abundance of consciousness and the song explores the ways we address and cope with the lack in inherent meaning in this existence.”
Formed in 2016, PHOBOPHLIC have steadily accumulated early releases in the shape of two demos, 2019’s Undimensioned Identities EP and a split release with Canada’s Sedimentum, all the while honing their craft out across the North American touring circuit – featuring live stints with Gatecreeper and Mutilatred respectively, as well as appearances at LDB Fest and Philadelphia Death Nexus – positioning themselves among US death metals most intriguing young acts.
Following their early productivity both in studio and on the road, PHOBOPHILIC pulled together to shape Enveloping Absurdity’s eight songs into existence. Shunning the fantastical in favour of lived human reality, the band opted to center their gaze on what it is to exist. Drawing from French writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as Germany’s Fredrich Nietzche’s strains of philosophical thought, Enveloping Absurdity is a meticulous vivisection of the philosophical self and purpose, as it asks fundamental questions of life’s true meaning.
PHOBOPHILIC’s formative promise is fully captured with a stellar production job that retains their to-the-bone intensity, but allows room for the underlying grandiosity of their compositions, thanks to Adam Tucker at Signaturetone Recording in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The artwork was then licensed from Finnish illustrator Joonas Räsänen at EvM Art, as the band sought to marry Enveloping Absurdity’s overarching thematic ponderance with aesthetic totality.
On their debut long player PHOBOPHILIC rebel against notions of defeat and pessimism, in spite of the struggles that come with an overabundance of consciousness, to a profound embrace of that which ails as well as thrills. At the beating heart of Enveloping Absurdity’s sonic extremity is a victory of the self, not content with simply surviving, but choosing to live.
Enveloping Absurdity tracklist:
1. Enantiodromia
2. Those Which Stare Back
3. Nauseating Despair
4. Cathedrals of Blood (Twilight of the Idols)
5. Individuation
6. The Illusion of Self
7. Survive in Obscurity
8. Enveloping Absurdity
PHOBOPHILIC is:
Aaron Dudgeon – guitars and vocals
Josh Poer – guitars
Christian Alm – bass
Vincent Tweten – drums
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