Fen are now unleashing the fierce video clip “Scouring Ignorance”, the first single-track taken from the East Anglian's forthcoming album Monuments To Absence, which is scheduled for release on July 7, 2023. Preorders available here.

"We originally wanted to pen a piece from a perspective of strength and self-actualization, addressing the idea of literally scouring ignorance from the world through determination and drive", mastermind Frank "The Watcher" Allain writes. "We swiftly became aware of the futility of such a notion and instead, 'Scouring Ignorance' confronts ignorance itself as an almost tangible force – an infectious, quasi-elemental power that sweeps across our reality. Enlightenment, reason, empathy, and rationality are scoured from thought by the corrosive nature of ignorance itself, willingly embraced by the hapless herds that infest this world. This is a more realistic way to address the manifestations of ignorance swirling around us, reflected in the feverish gaze of foaming-mouthed demagogues and lapped up by the multitudes of the witless. Accompanied by one of our most intense compositions to date and placing the piece as the opener of the album we feel is a defiant and determined statement."

The colour of any Fen album always provides a dead giveaway to its conceptual and musical direction. The cover artwork of the East Anglian's seventh full-length Monuments To Absence features an abundance of the colour red for the first time in the band's history.

Psychologically red is an energetic colour often associated with anger or warnings. And indeed, Fen describe Monuments To Absence as an expression of anger, hopelessness and despair – anger at the desperate futility of a human species hell-bent on self-destruction, cosseted in a shroud of wilful ignorance with all of the resulting hopelessness and despair that this entails.

The themes of anger and despair are also reflected in the musical direction of Monuments To Absence, which is audibly harsher and blacker compared to its predecessor The Dead Light (2019). Yet Fen have not merely shifted the balance back from the 'post-' to the black metal part of their music. The English trio views Monuments To Absence as a crystalline fusion of all of the elements that constitute their sound delivered with power, focus, and intent.

That Monuments To Absence is undoubtedly Fen's most extreme recording to date does not mean, the band has abandoned their atmospheric glory with spatial clean sections, heaving doom, and full-blown riffs, augmenting this furious expression of despairing rage.

Tracklisting:

“Scouring Ignorance”
“Monuments To Absence”
“Thrall”
“To Silence And Abyss We Reach”
“Truth Is Futility”
“Eschaton’s Gift”
“Wracked”
“All Is Lost”

“Scouring Ignorance” video: