Old Man Gloom, the Santa Fe behemoths of metal supergroup and, as it turns out, devilish tricksters of the highest order, are tomorrow releasing two new albums, not the measly one we were expecting. As they revealed on Facebook late last week (see below for a full explanation), what was going to be The Ape Of God is in fact two albums, both of which are titled, handily, The Ape Of God. Profound Lore have kindly given us a first play of the second album, which we’re hugely excited to host above.
It’s the sixth album by the band – comprising Aaron Turner, formerly of ISIS and Hydra Head Records founder, Converge’s Nate Newton, Cave In’s Caleb Scofield and Santos Montano – and comes in the band’s second wave, two years on from their last record, No, which followed an eight-year hiatus. One version of the album had already been put out as a promo, which the band revealed as a decoy (it contains a selection of edited versions of tracks from each album) late last week, with the band posting on Facebook: "Guess what, assholes. The Ape Of God is two entirely different albums. If you downloaded some leaked shit, you don’t have either. You have some bogus version we gave to press, cuz we knew those jerks would leak it (if you reviewed that fake record positively, thank you. We’re just THAT good). We will always trick you. We will always trick you. We will always trick you."
In an even mightier statement, Turner tells us of their reasoning for the two albums: "The illimitable majesty of Gloom simply could not be contained within the bounds of one album. While two albums is still barely enough to communicate but the bare essentials of our invaluable ideology, it radiates enough illuminative knowledge by which the lives of its listeners might be irrevocably altered for the better. Our task is not an enviable one – to bring light to a world so suffocated in darkness – none the less, a two-volume extrapolation of our previous and ongoing teachings is the least action we could undertake in this dire hour of need. So that’s why we made two records at once. And we wanted to trick people into thinking it was only one because the interweb has sucked all the fun out of releasing records and we wanted people to be fucking surprised by something again. At least we tried." Get hold of both albums from the label’s website here.
