Published: July 29, 2023

Footsteps trudge listlessly down concrete, barely making a sound, barely existing at all. For nobody here is truly alive, but merely moving; here in that place where what could be and could have been the beautiful whisper of a soft breeze through green leaves… is the soft illusory hum of motor, engine, turbine, and rubber on asphalt. There is beauty here, but what is beauty, if not Perception, a lie, a grace to the ever failing structure? Pale wards of love exchange failure, crumbling to exquisite entropy, as the piano narrates. Poignant sorrow, carried by the overarching melody and clean expressions. There is rage, too; embodied in wraithian utterances, cores blackened. And grandiosity, pride, the hubris of humanity, apocalyptically epic and brassened, heralding the beautiful fall of an indulgent epoch.

Indulge we did, at the gentle captivity of the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, swooning in intoxicated delirium, safe, a momentary hallucinatory respite from reality before spiraling into that which is… Without Conscience. Beneath the surface an indifferent cadence blossoms into a pitched vortex of violence, voices, voices of metropolitan dystopia; beasts roaring agony and rage, strings screaming, and tragedy cresting on the periphery of the wake. The momentum here rarely falters, such is the cacophonous pull of that void where once there once stood an ethic, peace found only briefly in the very eye of the storm. Through it we fall into limbo, into Lockdown, disoriented, deactivated, shackled with psychic bonds of fear, and from this consenting prison we kneel and submit.

Thus, we are emptied; isolated unto ourselves in chasms of despair, radiating need and toxicity, the slow and steady pulse of the opiate heart in freefall, anguished wails of guitar lamenting a desperately profound loss. Such grandiose orchestrations are built, such roaring rage is wrought from this seed of emptiness and depression, the core of a living death, blasted against the shores of the lorned, abandoned, forsaken, shepherded worms of misery. Culture is revealed as nothing but A Soul Purged. Everybody, and every body, is an abyss; cast aside, valued only vacuums prostituted into the Bissonnet track and the traffic of lechery, power, and abuse. Invisible is the soul, and unmistakable is the agony, yet without we are all unseeing, unseeing of the Unseen, they for whom existence is naught but suffering and rape. Every moment is a step away from light, every morning is a mourning step into the abyss.

Finally, what of the observer, the numbed witness, that hollowed wolf of the city of perdition? Despite all of this horror, the vast sprawl of urban hell seeping into every pore and neuron, hope struggles. That human capacity for delusion and fantasy, driven by a great fear of nothingness, the fear of accepting the reality of nothingness, a delusive Nihilophobia. One clings to this feeble strand, a solitary sprout of faith which barely manages to squeeze upward through a crack in the concrete and filth, only to be crushed under the heel of a merciless reality, the final ultimate acknowledgement at the moment of death: ………. There is No God To Greet Me. In the end, there is nothing, a halt, a void. A Soul Purged.

// information //

URBAIN hails from the dystopian borough of Houston, Texas. Dysanthropic expressions are leveled by the conglomerate of Andrew Caruana (also WILLS DISSOLVE) with songwriting, guitars, bass, backing vocals, production; Branson Heinz (also WILLS DISSOLVE) with concept, songwriting, lyrics, drums, bass; West Maddox (also OVNEV) with concept, songwriting, guitars, backing vocals; Shaurabh Nandy with orchestral arrangements, keys, and synth; Jerik Thibodeaux (also FATHER RUST and GOLGOTHAN) with lyrics, vocals; assist with  additional programming and voice by Nick Block (also WILLS DISSOLVE). 

Sporadic alluded comparisons with various conceptual and sonic rationales include: ULVER, VOICES, WHITE WARD, MOURNING BY MORNING, and LORNA SHORE or WORM SHEPHARD (or any comparable symphonic deathcore… don’t be dissuaded, it has something to do with the vocal and synth combination on occasion but there are no breakdowns, and the project remains specifically black metal). 

A Soul Purged is available NOW. Hypnotic Dirge Records and URBAIN Bandcamp are the decayed access vectors. Crumbling dystopian articles being offered are CD and vinyl LP (to be announced).