Photo by: Georgina Staikou
Official press release:
Athens-based metal outfit W.E.B. will release their Colosseum full-length on November 19th via Metal Blade Records today unveiling the record’s artwork, track listing, first single, and pre-orders.
Forged in 2002 out of a “necessity to scream, blast, and create emotions and get on stage to exchange them with an audience,” Greece’s W.E.B. have steadily forged a path to becoming one of the premier European symphonic extreme metal bands expressing darkness and death through adrenaline and poetry. An output that’s both candid and theatrical, W.E.B. is here to move you, provoke you, and invite you on a journey through ravendark and starless nights. With four albums already under their collective belt, 2021’s fifth full-length, Colosseum, is inarguably the band’s greatest and most direct work to date. Guitarist/vocalist Sakis Prekas states:
“We wanted this album to be as straightforward as we could make it. We wanted it to be aggressive and to the point, and at the same time we have pushed literally everything, higher, faster, louder, harder. It is our most metal album.”
Combining the brutal with the catchy and drenching it in orchestrations that only serve to expand its epic scale, Colosseum is a thrilling, gripping listen with each of its nine tracks playing an important part in the album as a whole, making it clear that W.E.B. stands toe-to-toe with anyone in their genre.
With Colosseum, the band welcomes two new members: drummer Nikitas Mandolas, who joined following the recording of 2017’s Tartarus and whose playing is perfectly suited to the music W.E.B. make, and bassist/vocalist Hel Pyre. They said:
“Apart from the great lyrics and the perfect bass performance, she offered her brutal and clean vocals on many parts of the album, leaving her own mark of fire. This is a completely new element for W.E.B. that really gave a unique character to the material.”
With the lineup solidified, writing commenced in early 2019, sending ideas back and forth to one another, subsequently honing each song over many pre-production sessions. Sakis states:
“With no references, when we make music, our only thoughts are that we want to make it sound as awesome as we can.”
The dramatic orchestrations are of course a large part of that, with Christos Antoniou of Septicflesh handling this aspect of the sound as he has on previous W.E.B. releases. The group concludes:
“Metal is the most revolutionary music genre ever to exist; adding to it symphonic orchestra makes the experience even more epic and emotional in a massive way. We want our music to inspire the senses, thus we aspire to make it intense from our perspective.”
Stream W.E.B.’s first single “Dominus Maleficarum” below:
W.E.B.’s Colosseum will be available on CD, fruit punch-colored LP, and digital formats. Find pre-ordering options HERE.
Colosseum track listing:
- “Dark Web”
- “Murder of Crows”
- “Pentalpha”
- “Colosseum”
- “Dominus Maleficarum”
- “Necrology”
- “Ensanguined”
- “Exaudi Luciferi”
- “December 13th”
