Rise From Ruins: Absent In Body, A Band Featuring Current And Former Members Of Amenra, Neurosis, Sepultura Share New Song/Video

Absent In Body make their Relapse Records debut with the terrifying new album Plague God, out March 25, 2022. Today, Absent In Body share the crushing third single “Rise From Ruins.”  

“Rise From Ruins” made a special debut this past Sunday, March 6 as part of All Elite Wrestling’s Revolution PPV event. “Rise From Ruins” is the official theme song of the television show’s House of Black group featuring AEW wrestlers Malakai Black, Brody King (God’s Hate) and Buddy Matthews. Watch the full entrance here.

Absent In Body‘s Mathieu Vandekerckhove Comments:

“The blueprints of most AIB songs were made when I was on tour with Amenra. Because of the long journeys, I had a lot of free time on the bus. Different landscapes every day. The emptiness of the mountains, the desolate empty cities at night…

At one day, when recording the album, I had too much negative news and havoc on my socials shoved into my face. And the riff to this song was an instinctive reaction to that. I fought it off.  This song is definitely a reflection of that moment, that day.”

Featuring current and former members of AMENRA, NEUROSIS, and SEPULTURA, Plague God is bound by the same ideals of unity and fearlessly uncompromising honesty of expression that have driven their respective bands to imperious heights of reverence and groundbreaking sonic deliverance. Plague God is by turns devastating and sublime, drawn from musicians for whom life and art are inextricably bound.

Pre-order Plague God here and revisit Absent In Body’s “The Acres/The Ache” music video here and the “Sarin” music video here.

In an era overrun by information, misinformation, unseen algorithms and viral contagion, to seek out what’s truly human in the face of overwhelming and unfathomable forces has perhaps become our most sacred of tasks. It’s an impulse that lies at the very heart of Plague God, the debut album from Absent In Body – the oppressive, industrial-driven collaboration by members of AMENRA, NEUROSIS and SEPULTURA. Bound by the same ideals of unity and fearlessly uncompromising honesty of expression that have driven their respective bands to imperious heights of reverence and groundbreaking sonic deliverance, Plague God is by turns devastating and sublime, drawn from musicians for whom life and art are inextricably bound.

Initially the brainchild of AMENRA guitarist Mathieu J. Vandekerckhove, and NEUROSIS vocalist/guitarist Scott Kelly, ABSENT IN BODY formed in 2017. Immediately recognising their kinship, and with AMENRA frontman Colin H. Van Eeckhout brought in on vocals and bass, what emerged is a reflection of the intervening years of turbulence, extending it’s scope as it navigates across five stretches of unstable terrain. From the opening “Rise From Ruins” with ex-Sepultura drummer, Iggor Cavalera’s tribal beat emerging from foreboding, near-subsonic oscillations to explode in a tide of corrosive riffs and feral howls, through “Sarin’s” steadfast, procession-through-purgatory groove, to “The Half Rising Man’s” matrix of organic/mechanic evolution, it’s an album in constant dialogue between the animalistic, the human and the industrial, and a hunger to distill a truth, something unpolluted from the fray. 

Here Protest music is often perceived as a petition, or a counter-argument against a controlling force. There is another sense of protest, though, that of a machine under stress: articulating the pressures weighing down on it by means of an involuntary, primal response. It’s these states of critical mass at which we must truly find ourselves, under duress maybe, but unblinded and alive. Plague God doesn’t just give voice to these moments of truth, but in the band’s deep kinship integral to every claustrophobic judder, every stretch of atmospheric dread and helpless alias assumed, lies a freedom we both forget and attain at our peril.