Blackened progressive-heavy metallers CORMORANT have completed the recording of their sophomore full-length album Dwellings to be released in mid-fall, 2011.

The band recorded their rhythm tracks live to analog tape with producer Justin Weis (AGALLOCH, BROCAS HELM, HAMMERS OF MISFORTUNE, LUDICRA, SLOUGH FEG, SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM)at Trakworx Studios in South San Francisco, CA. Weis also mixed and mastered the album.

Vocalist/bassist Arthur von Nagel commented: “I feel Dwellings is a refinement of our folky hybrid style on Metazoa; just really pissed off. We wrote and rehearsed the album over the course of two years. That time period was marked by some difficult personal losses and sacrifices, which definitively coloured the music and lyrics. At its core, it's a trad/prog metal album, but quite a bit more dissonance and blackness seeped in. Nick [Cohon] and Matt [Solis]'s guitars sound massive and evil, and Brennan [Kunkel]'s drumming is beautifully twisted – he never plays the same beat twice. Vocal-wise we went all-out, in fact my voice was completely blown out for nearly week after the recording. We've expanded the palette to include black metal shrieks, a semi-harsh LEMMY KILMISTER bark, first-wave black metal shouts, spoken word, and ethereal cleans. I hope above all that people view this is as an honest record, because it's truly been a labor of love and struggle.”

Frontman Arthur von Nagel also commented: “Whereas Metazoa focused on the natural world, Dwellings broaches human structures: societal, linguistic, familial, and architectural. The word dwellings encapsulated all those ideas, and inspired dreamlike imagery of stone huts carved into cliffsides. I feel the word captures a wide swathe of human motivations, particularly man's need for home and family, a major lyrical theme on this album. The lyrics themselves range in style from poetic and abstract to journalistic, which was a nice change of pace for us. While in the past we tended toward mythological and historical subjects, on Dwellings we often attack more contemporary topics in a very stark and direct manner.”

The band’s album Metazoa is streaming online now at this location.

A video of the band playing a new instrumental track from Dwelling, live at The Hemlock on July 2010, can be seen below: