…and Oceans craft sonic alchemy on ‘Prophetical Mercury Implement’

Finland’s symphonic black metal visionaries …AND OCEANS return with their second single, Prophetical Mercury Implement, taken from their upcoming album ‘The Regeneration Itinerary’. Accompanied by a visually stunning music video, the track is a deep dive into the album’s overarching themes of transformation, duality, and alchemical rebirth.

The music video for Prophetical Mercury Implement manifests the band’s ability to blend ferocious black metal aggression with ethereal symphonic elements, crafting a sonic experience that is both cerebral and devastatingly intense.

Watch the music video for Prophetical Mercury Implement on the Season of Mist YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/kekWgv0PwkA

With relentless riff work, soaring orchestration, and a labyrinthine structure, Prophetical Mercury Implement encapsulates the essence of The Regeneration Itinerary. Lyrically, the track draws upon the fluid and volatile nature of mercury, a symbol of transformation and introspection in both alchemical and philosophical traditions. Vocalist Mathias Lillmåns explores the concept of dissolving into reflective waters, where self-awareness and annihilation become indistinguishable.

“Now, I am the medium / I am the stream…
Drowning in argent colors / This vast bottomless ocean.”

As the central turning point in the album’s conceptual narrative, the song embodies the struggle between light and darkness, stagnation and progress, fate and free will—mirroring the overarching journey of The Regeneration Itinerary, an album loosely inspired by the dualities explored in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

“The Prophetical Mercury Implement is an existential realization. I was exploring some very deep waters at some point, I could see the mercury dripping from my side, but still wanted more, searching for new dangerous currents to take me further.” Lillmåns notes.

“I just kept on feeding the destruction until one day I had reached some kind of a threshold. Even though this track is a view from a vast bottomless depth it also offers a glimpse of the other side, a promise of redemption and transcendence.”

Musically composed by Timo Kontio, the track seamlessly weaves between chaotic black metal precision and expansive, dreamlike atmospheres. With its unpredictable structure, eerie synth-driven passages, and Lillmåns’ commanding vocal presence, Prophetical Mercury Implement stands as a towering demonstration to …AND OCEANS‘ continued evolution in the symphonic black metal landscape.

Due for release on May 23rd, The Regeneration Itinerary is an intricate conceptual work that channels themes of philosophy, alchemical transmutation, and the eternal interplay of opposites. As the successor to 2020’s Cosmic World Mother, the album builds upon the band’s legendary symphonic black metal foundations while pushing their sonic and lyrical scope into uncharted territory.

The Regeneration Itinerary was recorded at Inka Studio / SoundSpiral Audio, produced by Juho Räihä, and mixed & mastered at the renowned Necromorbus Studio by Tore Stjerna. The album’s striking artwork was created by Adrien Bousson, visually encapsulating its themes of regeneration, chaos, and transformation.

Chaos chameleons. Nocturnal shapeshifters. The skyward trajectory of idiosyncratic Finnish extremists …and Oceans has been serpentine and sublime.

Since rising in 1995 from the ashes of death metal outfit Festerday, the group’s esoteric take on extreme music has seem them draw on a gamut on contrasting elements, ranging from black and death metal to classical, industrial and EBM, forever questing through various line-up changes, defying expectations while remaining wholly true to themselves.

“We’ve never been tied to one particular genre,” explains founding member, guitarist Timo Kontio. “As a band, we are driven to explore, to traverse unfamiliar landscapes, while always preserving our core sound. It’s about striking a balance. There’s the constant need in this band for renewal and ambition, but never at a cost to our identity.”

The group’s earliest albums, The Dynamic Gallery of Thoughts (1998) and The Symmetry of I: The Circle of O (1999), combined bombastic synth-driven salvos, blisteringly raw guitars, piercing banshee shrieks and ornate gothic arrangements in eviscerating wrath-fuelled blasts, while several celestial passages and near-dungeon synth segues already demonstrated the band’s need to mix things up.

A more seismic shift came in the mutant forms of A.M.G.O.D. (2001) and Cypher (2002), which saw …and Oceans transmogrify into a crushing cybernetic colossus, bulldozing into dystopian anti-futures with batteries of scalding techno beats and chugging palm-muted malevolence.

Accompanied by frontman Kena Strömsholm’s android syntax, the band’s dark heart now pumped corrosive hydraulic fluids around digital membranes, its symphonic black metal supercharged by martial industrial rhythms and infectious melo-death grooves.

The metamorphosis intensified with an interim rebrand as …and Oceans disbanded and its members reassembled under the name Havoc Unit in 2005, a vehicle for further mechanised contagions and noise worship, issuing their sole full-length, h.IV+ (Hoarse Industrial Viremia), in 2008.

But throughout these detours the mournful essence of …and Oceans’ singular universe endured, gathered together by a lamenting thread, a dolefulness unique to the Finnish scene, borne emphatically in the impassioned guitars of Kontio and his axe-wielding brother-in-arms, Teemu Saari. “Melancholia is everywhere, it’s in all the music that I make, especially my lead work,” elaborates Kontio. “It’s a key factor, distinctive to the whole …and Oceans catalogue.”

The band’s insatiable thirst for reinvention would subsequently find sustenance in its 90s roots, recasting the symphonic pomp of the past in the ardent furnace of experience and experimentation. Reconvening under the …and Oceans banner in 2017, the resulting brace of albums – Cosmic World Mother (2020) and As in Gardens, So in Tombs (2023) – redefined the group once more with ornate epics brimful of deliciously grim Karelian melodies and the chimerical atmospheres of keyboardist Antti Simonen, while new vocalist Mathias Lillmåns, replacing the departing Strömsholm, reinforced ties to black metal’s second wave with his devastatingly toxic rasp.

Now, 30 years on from their auspicious birth, …and Oceans have unveiled their most accomplished statement yet. A flamboyant distillation of the group’s grand nocturnal art, The Regeneration Itinerary assimilates all their hopes, dreams and influences into an uncompromising document of ravenous intent, with inebriating stylistic hybrids such as ‘Inertiae’ and ‘The Form and the Formless’ seamlessly fusing the heady onrush of symphonic black metal to the bludgeoning pulse of Simonen’s trance-dance hypnosis.

“The new album can be seen as a synthesis of our entire back catalogue,” suggests Lillmåns. “But there are new levels of extremity, too, ones that we’ve never reached before. These songs simply demanded harsher vocals. The riffs commanded it, and who am I to disobey?”

“This is our most experimental album since our comeback,” states Kontio. “It might be considered a continuation of the music we made in the 90s, but the sound has ripened and developed as our individual tastes have broadened, our inspirations subconsciously feeding into the band’s sound, necessitating change. From the very start, this band has encouraged progression and growth.”

Representing an intrepid summation of …and Oceans’ extraordinary journey, their continuing evolution, The Regeneration Itinerary locates the band’s dramatic thaumaturgical blends within a conceptual framework of opposites (and opposition).

“The Regeneration Itinerary explores the interplay between darkness and light, chaos and order, spiritual and material realms, with each song embodying an experience for the mind and body, navigating a passage to the present moment,” explains Lillmåns.

“The album works like a guide,” he continues. “Teaching us that not everything can be defined as simply being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘light’ or ‘dark’, ‘copper’ or mercury’, underscoring the perpetual dance of dualities in the human experience.”

Line-up:
Mathias Lillmåns – Vocals
Teemu Saari – Guitar
Timo Kontio – Guitar
Pyry Hanski – Bass
Antti Simonen – Keyboards
Kauko Kuusisalo – Drums