Here’s a brand new lyric video for the new track, “In These Halls She Mourns Eternally”. This song is the bonus track from the recently released Reawakening. I’m quite proud of this song and I wanted to shine a spotlight on it by making this video and also revealing some background information about it.

I wrote “In These Halls” all the way back in early 2016 with nothing but an acoustic guitar shortly after moving to Argentina. Back then I didn’t have any way of recording music or even keeping track of new music I wrote. I didn’t have a laptop, so I couldn’t sketch out my ideas in Guitar Pro, and I didn’t even have an electric guitar to record any serious metal tracks. All I had was an acoustic guitar and my memory – and neither that guitar nor my ability to remember things are very reliable!

Later that year, I got access to a computer with Guitar Pro and I was able to write out the music and experiment a little with the keyboards, drums, electric guitar parts, etc. I wrote the lyrics shortly after. Based on this one song, I decided that I wanted to not only write a full-length Ebon Arcanum album as a follow-up to Awakening, but I wanted it to be a concept album. I came up with a basic premise for the album, and wrote up a draft tracklist with titles that progress with the story. The idea was based on the Victorian era, Lovecraftian themes, and also the game Bloodborne.

I used “In These Halls” as the starting point for the story, like a catalyst that kicks off the events in the rest of the concept album. A woman loses her son in a tragic and horrifying way, and even after he’s interred in the church catacombs, she refuses to leave his side. She weeps and mourns for what seems like an eternity, her cries echoing through the empty tunnels and dark halls, praying that somehow her son will be returned to her.

Musically, this song is very different to anything else I’ve written for Ebon Arcanum, with elements of doom metal, melodic metal and progressive metal mixed with the project’s bread and butter, black metal. It’s a good introduction for the material I’m working on for the next full-length album, as all the songs I’ve written for it so far have a similar vibe. They’re still black metal at heart, but a little more diverse and cinematic than Awakening ever was.

I don’t want to reveal too much just yet, but rest assured that there’s plenty more in the works for Ebon Arcanum. The next album will redefine what the project is, will establish the true meaning of “Ebon Arcanum”, and will birth an entire universe in which this and future chapters will take place in. Stay tuned!