Official press release:
Southern California deathcore titans Carnifex have announced their new album, More Than Misery, set for release on November 6th via Sumerian Records. The announcement comes with the album’s title track and its official music video. Stream “More Than Misery“ HERE, watch the video below and pre-order the album HERE.
Survival has always been the live wire running through vocalist Scott Ian Lewis’s lyrics. On earlier Carnifex records, he wrote while still locked inside the experiences he was trying to endure and process. More Than Misery changes that perspective. For the first time, Lewis is writing after the act of surviving.
That perspective gives the album title its deliberate double meaning. Heard one way, “more than misery” suggests something even worse waiting beyond the darkness. Here, it becomes an assertion that a person’s life is larger than the misery it contains.
The title track brings that idea into brutal focus. Its lyrics descend through burning obsession, isolation and self-loathing, caught in the pull of poison and a cycle of suffering that feels impossible to break. Then the grip loosens. The face fades, the mask tears away and the song arrives at the album’s hard-won thesis: life will always be more than misery.
Speaking on the album and its title track, Lewis shares:
“More Than Misery is about what happens when suffering becomes more than something you endure, it becomes what changes you. This is Carnifex at our most honest and unapologetically brutal”.
Musically, Carnifex approached More Than Misery with the goal of combining their original 2005 musicality with the tools now available in 2026. The album brings together the physical directness of first-wave deathcore, the band’s death-metal foundations, the symphonic atmosphere developed across their later records and the decision to focus on guitars remaining the primary musical voice, with orchestration used to deepen their impact. Every song was built with the live room in mind, from pit and circle-pit movement to whether the five musicians could carry each part convincingly onstage.
The record was tracked in Tennessee with Zach Householder of Whitechapel and mixed by Jeff Dunne, bringing an entirely new production team into the band’s creative process.
More Than Misery is Carnifex’s first full-length album for Sumerian Records. The partnership was introduced in May with the release of “Roses & Rotting Corpses”, opening a campaign that now reveals its emotional and musical centre.
Twenty-one years after helping shape deathcore’s first wave, Carnifex have made a record that turns survival from a recurring subject into a changed point of view. More Than Misery carries the darkness that has always defined the band, now with the clarity of five musicians who know exactly what survived it.
More Than Misery will be released on November 6th via Sumerian Records. Pre-order HERE.
More Than Misery track listing:
- “…and I Held Hands With Death”
- “More Than Misery”
- “The Process Of Pain” feat. Chaney Crabb (Entheos)
- “No Gods Only Graves”
- “Coffin Crowned King”
- “Roses & Rotting Corpses”
- “Only The Dead”
- “Gothic Serpent”
- “Heart Made of Teeth”
- “Licking Love From A Knife”
