Amenra have shared the official “Voor Immer” music video from the impending Relapse debut full-length De Doorn (June 25).

Additionally, Amenra have announced a livestream event celebrating the release of De Doorn. The fire ritual will commence on June 27 at 9 PM CET. More info at tickets are available at Dice.fm.

Amenra vocalist Colin H. van Eeckhout comments:

“What you lose in the fire, you will find in the ashes

"‘Voor Immer’ (‘For Ever’) was one of the first songs we have written for De Doorn. We played it for the very first time in 2018 on the city square of Dixmude, West Flanders Belgium. Accompanied by the carillon, its bells a typical instrument from Belgium and the low countries, we connected the earth with the sky. It was initially written for a commemoration ceremony of the ending of the First World War. 

“Images of widows and mothers bereft of their sons. Destroyed cities and whom was left to die. Finding strength and courage to rebuild what once was there, without what was theirs.

“The last time we played it live was in Menen, West Flanders Belgium end 2019. That night we gathered and burnt all our unacknowledged loss. Revealing by fire the 20feet high bronze Amenra statue glowing red, a symbol of hope.

“This is a song about finding that hope, the strength to carry on. Its content ever present in the world today.”

De Doorn is out June 25 on Deluxe 2xLP/2xLP/CD/CS/Digital. Physical pre-orders via Relapse.com are available here. Digital Downloads/Streaming here. A super limited, one time press features gold foil stamping printed on jackets and are available exclusively through Relapse.com and at band live performances.

De Doorn tracklisting:

"Ogentroost"
"De Dood In Bloei"
"De Evenmens"
"Het Gloren"
"Voor Immer"

"Voor Immer" video:

"De Evenmens" video:

Amenra’s first release for Relapse Records is at once a departure and a momentous act of deliverance. Stepping outside the run of albums titled Mass I-VI, De Doorn casts a 21-year journey from the heart of Belgium’s crusading hardcore scene to world-renowned, spiritually guided innovators in an enthralling new light.

Ritual, remembrance and hard-won rebirth have always been at the heart of Amenra’s colossal, soul-purging approach. Centered around frontman Colin H. Van Eeckhout, but marked out by a transcendent unity of purpose, their albums have acted as totemic, personal marker points, a means to process individual grief as a shared, cathartic experience. Their live shows are acts of incendiary, communal exorcism that reach a cusp of sublime, out-of-body experience. A closely knit collective, they transport you to a febrile state where confrontation of pain, transformation and true healing can occur.

Amenra have always been profoundly bound to their hometowns around Flanders, the weight of that area’s war-torn history. The sacrifice and sense of a larger purpose that bridges the fragility of humanity and the pull of an immaculate ideal is carried as an ever-present resonance. No more is this apparent than in the spectacular, commemorative events the band have performed in recent years – to mark ending of the First World War; the band’s 20th anniversary; and the departure of long-time band member Levy Seynaeve. At the SMAK Museum Of Contemporary Art in Ghent’s 19th-century, monument-strewn Citadelpark in May 2019, they offered a communal recognition of loss and letting go. Here, audience members were invited to make their own offerings, placing personal notes of acknowledgment in wooden structures created by Indonesian artist Toni Kanwa Adikusumah, before they were brought out into the park and set alight as an act of recognition and release – a forging of hope from the flames.

Written for the purpose of that rite, De Doorn (‘The Thorn’) occupies a place between Amenra’s recorded and live work, less a testimony to the band’s individual bereavements, more an invitation for others to come forward, and to pass through darkness into light. Where the Mass albums have taken the form of solitary struggles whose fearless honesty has aligned itself to the most intrinsically human of chords, the dynamics of De Doorn are as stricken by destiny as ever, but sonically looser. Guided to a lesser extent by the band’s characteristically immense, behind-the-beat traction, it’s more lush, immersive, steeped in sonorous, cathedral-echo ambiences amplified to the point of static-infected instability and carrying passages of deeply intimate spoken-word that feel like being drawn in to the most hallowed of confidences. Its themes of dialogue and the passing of knowledge are echoed in the combined vocals of Colin and Oathbreaker’s Caro Tanghe. Her spectral presence on the opening Ogentroost acts as both counterpoint and complement to Colin’s stricken howl as the song cycles between enervation and helplessly compelled momentum. Their whispered devotions in the following, vast, hallowed atmospheres of De Dood In Bloei leave you feeling as though you’re bearing witness to the most private of conversations.

The thorn is the most potent of symbols – in religious terms, a reclamation and an agony as a mark of transformation. It’s the nagging reminder of vulnerability and it’s the violent protector, without which beauty cannot thrive. For the cover of De Doorn, it’s been cast in bronze – a thing of value and a memorial, each band member given their own piece to symbolise their own pain and their belonging to the greater whole. In bronze, it is both nature and something else – a mark of singularity and a portal to a continuity that we all share. As Amenra have acknowledged once more, it’s one that hears our call, even when we feel we are at our most alone.

- Recorded by Tim De Gieter at Much Luv Studio, Lembeke BE
- Mastered by Frank Arkright, Abbey Road Studio, London UK

Amenra Is:

Colin H. van Eeckhout - Lead Vocals
Mathieu Vandekeckhove - Guitar
Bjorn J. Lebon - Percussion
Lennart Bossu - Guitar
Tim De Gieter - Guitar
Caro Tanghe - Backup Vocals

(Photo - Stefaan Temmerman)