On March 31st, Warbringer will deliver their monumental fifth record, entitled Woe To The Vanquished, via Napalm Records. To shorten the waiting time the band has  unleashed the first ripping track from the album. A music video for "Silhouettes", directed by Orie McGinness (Enlighten Creative Studio) and produced by Shan Dan Horen (Shadow Born Group), can be seen below.  

Singer John Kevill gives a deeper insight into "Silhouettes": “This song, the album opener, is a blazing and intense number; we wanted the album to open with pure annihilation. I had the lyric in my head and the frantic riff under the verse since the beginning of 2014, and I am very pleased that it exists as a full song now.

“The idea for the song came from a particularly chilling detail found at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; when the atomic bombs went off the shadows of people whose bodies were vaporized still remain burned onto the walls and the ground where they once stood. To me, this is goddamn horrifying. I thought - "What if the souls of those dead remain trapped in the shadows?"

“I wanted to have the song written from a future where civilization has failed, the Earth is in ruins and the few remaining survivors live a horrible existence. The untold millions of shadows from this future, burnt into stone, look back at us in the present time and judge us for bringing about the apocalypse that, though we saw it coming, we did nothing to avoid.

“The way I see it, we continue funding weaponry that keeps getting more and more devastating (search "satan-2" if you think this issue is some relic), and leadership seems on a sharp downward trend as well. Not the ingredients for a positive outcome. Remember, it only takes one mistake, once, and everything everyone has ever built, written, painted, all music, all culture, every ounce of human achievement is gone, in a single blinding flash. Like it or not, this is the world we live in today, and entering 2017 the delicate balance tips and sways more and more.

“So, Happy New Year. Enjoy the time we have left, and fucking thrash. Woe to the Vanquished. We're Ghosts!”

Woe To The Vanquished has been carefully crafted over a period of time, and the album was produced and mixed by Mike Plottnikoff (Fear Factory, In Flames), mastered by Howie Weinberg (Slayer, Pantera) with cover art by the esteemed  Andreas Marschall (Sodom, Blind Guardian, Obituary).

Album formats:

- Regular Jewel Case Edition    
- 1LP Gatefold Edition (black & other coloured editions)      
- Super Deluxe Wooden Box Warchest Edition (CD, exclusive 2 track 7" single, flag, band logo dog tags) only available via the Napalm Records webstores in the US and Europe - strictly limited to 500 copies

Pre-order the album here.

Tracklisting:

“Silhouettes”
“Woe To The Vanquished”
“Remain Violent”
“Shellfire”
“Descending Blade”
“Spectral Asylum”
“Divinity Of Flesh”
“When The Guns Fell Silent”
 
Bonus 7" Single trackisting:

“Evil Dead” (Death cover featuring Chris Monroy of Skeletal Remains)      
“Arc Lite” (Coroner cover featuring Jadran 'Conan' Gonzalez of Exmortus)

More info on Woe To The Vanquished and the story behind it described by singer John Kevill, who is not only fronting Warbringer, but also studying to be a history professor:
 
"The title Woe to the Vanquished comes from early Roman history--before they were the huge empire they became. In 390 BC, a host of Gauls led by a warlord called Brennus attacked Rome, and captured all the city except the Capitoline Hill. From this hill the defeated Romans made a bargain, they would pay 1,000 pounds of gold for the Gallic army to leave the city with no further bloodshed. The Romans bring the gold before Brennus, who uses his own scales to measure it. On the Gaul's scales, the Roman's thousand pounds of gold measured to be less, which led the Romans to complain that the scale was rigged (it probably was). Responding to this, Brennus speaks "Vae Victis" (Woe to the Vanquished) and throws his sword on the counterweight. Because the Romans lost, they have to pay the rigged sum of gold as well as the weight of the sword, to add insult to injury. The irony here is that vowing this type of humiliation would never happen again, Rome went on to become an ancient war machine conquering and subjugating most of the old world. On the record Woe to the Vanquished is spoken in an ironic, mocking tone--the defeated are trampled and time marches on, uncaring, and forgets they ever existed."     
 
Woe To The Vanquished  “making of” :

Just in time for their album release March 31st, the band will be hitting the road all over Europe in Spring and Summer, including already confirmed festivals like Spain's Resurrection Fest, Slovenia's Metal Days and Devilstone in Lithuania, with more to be announced.

Find the band’s live itinerary here.