Bats are aflutter. Hounds howl longingly. Deathly chills fill the autumnal air. A foreboding crescent moon hangs low in the night sky—the stage for Tribulation’s new album, Where the Gloom Becomes Sound, is set. The preternatural horror and antediluvian mystery of the past have yet again returned, luminous, haunting, and intimate like a fresh corpse. The Swedish Grammy Award-winning quartet toiled for the better part of two years in various innominate undercrofts and ritualized hollows to nail down Where the Gloom Becomes Sound. They emerged with an exhilarating spell of an album. Numinous yet kindred to the gothified castings of Down Below (2018) and its predecessor Children of the Night (2015), Tribulation’s fifth full-length indisputably elevates the Swedes to the highest echelons. The source of their glinting darkness: a yawning, bottomless rift deep within.

“We immersed ourselves in the world of myth and magic,” says guitarist Adam Zaars. “With a specific focus on elemental magic, and the elements, in general, from both the Western and Indian esoteric traditions, not the Buddhist four elements but the five elements. Myth and magic are obviously not something new in the world of Tribulation, but it got a bit more specific on this album. We just present it from a slightly different perspective.