GOST exists in the dark crack between black metal and the most shadowy end of electronic music. Since the release of the Radio Macabre EP at the start of 2013, and the remorseless digital nightmare of their Skull debut album six months later, Texas-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, and main-brain James Lollar has become an increasingly singular force in music. Far more aggressive and sinister than the synthwave he’s often grouped with, GOST is a harsh and unique digital nightmare that takes the listener right into the heart of the abyss.
Now GOST returns with their sixth album, Prophecy. Unquestionably their most exhilarating and dangerous sounding work to date, Prophecy is a record that perfectly reflects the horror and grim anxieties of a world beset with religious and political overreach, and progress, “being rolled back to the fucking 1950s.”
“It’s about an imaginative fall of the Western civilization, the biblical end of the world – the rise of Satan and Armageddon,” says Lollar. “In America, there’s been a big rise of scared, reactive Christianity again, and almost like a re-emergence of the Satanic Panic. So it felt like an appropriate time to bring Satan back into things.”
Recorded alone in Texas during a burst of creativity at the end of 2022, Prophecy is the perfect vessel for such things. Following the experimentation and more melodic touches of 2019's Valediction, Lollar says it also acts as something of a return to older roots, to recapture the spirit of GOST.
“When Valediction came out, COVID hit, and I guess people weren’t so into art while the world was on its knees,” he says. “I also wanted to reconnect with some of my older fans who maybe didn’t feel that album so much. I wanted to go back in time and bring some of the older shit back, some of the older sounds.“
Face A:
Judgment
Prophecy
Death in Bloom
Deceiver
Obituary
Temple of Tears
Decadent Decay
Face B:
Widow Song
Golgotha
Digital Death
Shelter
Through the Water
Leviathan
