Carnifex are heading back into the darkness, but this time they’re approaching it from the other side.
Southern California deathcore veterans Carnifex have announced their new album More Than Misery, arriving November 6th via Sumerian Records.
Alongside the announcement comes the album’s title track, ‘More Than Misery’, complete with an official music video (below).
For vocalist Scott Ian Lewis, the record represents a subtle but important shift. Suffering and survival have been stitched into Carnifex’s writing for years, but where previous records were often written while Lewis was still caught inside those experiences, More Than Misery looks at what happens afterwards.
‘More Than Misery is about what happens when suffering becomes more than something you endure, it becomes what changes you. This is Carnifex at our most honest and unapologetically brutal’.
That idea gives the title a neat bit of ugliness. ‘More than misery’ could easily suggest something even worse lurking around the corner. Instead, Carnifex are using it to argue that a life can ultimately become larger than the suffering contained within it.
Carnifex ‘More Than Misery’ video
Carnifex go back to 2005
Musically, Carnifex deliberately looked backwards while making the album.
The band approached More Than Misery by combining the musical instincts of their formative 2005 era with everything they have learned in the two decades since.
That means the blunt-force impact of early deathcore remains intact, but it sits alongside Carnifex’s death metal foundations and the increasingly symphonic, blackened atmosphere of their later work.
Importantly, guitars remain at the centre rather than disappearing beneath orchestration.
The band also built the songs with live performance in mind, considering everything from circle pits and crowd movement to whether all five members could convincingly reproduce the material onstage.
More Than Misery was recorded in Tennessee with Whitechapel guitarist Zach Householder and mixed by Jeff Dunne, introducing an entirely new production team to Carnifex.
It also marks their first full-length release through Sumerian Records, following May’s ‘Roses & Rotting Corpses’.
Twenty one years removed from their formation, Carnifex aren’t pretending the darkness disappeared, they’ve just survived long enough to see it differently.
Carnifex – ‘More Than Misery’ Track List
- ‘…and I Held Hands With Death’
- ‘More Than Misery’
- ‘The Process Of Pain (ft. Chaney Crabb)’
- ‘No Gods Only Graves’
- ‘Coffin Crowned King’
- ‘Roses & Rotting Corpses’
- ‘Only The Dead’
- ‘Gothic Serpent’
- ‘Heart Made of Teeth’
- ‘Licking Love From A Knife’
More Than Misery arrives November 6th via Sumerian Records.
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