Hello everyone, it's been a while (besides the webshop posts)
We've been quietly working in the background and now have three new releases planned between December 2015 - February 2016, all of which will be doom releases co-released between Hypnotic Dirge and Solitude Productions! We will announce these releases in October! This is the way of the future now and it's simply become unaffordable for us to continue on making releases alone with abysmally low sales and ever-increasing expenses.
I can say with confidence that doom fans will really appreciate these three upcoming albums, all of which present a different side of what doom can offer, so we're looking forward to these releases and sharing them with you.
Now for the uncomfortable part. I would really like to continue on with Hypnotic Dirge beyond these three releases, but the trends do not look promising at all. Making trades to bring in outside labels' releases is seeming more and more like a lost cause as even bringing in 3 or 4 copies of an album means they will sit on my shelves here for years, unsold. Despite posting a new album from the shop almost every day on facebook this month, there have literally been 4 orders in all of September overall! It's becoming truly pathetic, despite having over 800 albums available from bands around the world, all of the CD's being brand new, and available at cheap prices!
These next few months will be the final litmus test. I will see how sales go until the spring and honestly if things don't improve that will likely be the end of Hypnotic Dirge. A lot of obligations, a lot of debt, and very little chance of even coming close to breaking even which is a shame. I'm not trying to guilt anyone. If HDR disappears there will still be countless labels releasing this sort of music which will easily fill the void. We won't really be missed or remembered in the grand scheme of things, that's for sure. However, I am just being honest about the situation. I would love to keep releasing new albums from the great talented musicians we have worked with in the past, but if the support from the metal community is no longer there, we're not going to push a 500 kg boulder up a steep hill anymore
