Dutch symphonic black-metal project Golden Ashes, created by Maurice de Jong of Gnaw Their Tongues, is now sharing their entire third album A Lightless Christ Shuns The Crown Of Divinity ahead of its release August 23 via Improved Sequence Records.

Created by the incredibly prolific Maurice de Jong, largely known for Gnaw Their Tongues, but also involved in projects like De Magia Veterum, Cloak of Altering, Hagetisse, Caput Mortuum, and Pyriphlegeton among many others, Golden Ashes signaled its birth in 2018 with The Desolation EP.

Following that first EP came the full-length Gold Are the Ashes of the Restorer, during the spring of 2019. The title itself suggested a unique take on familiar black metal themes, and the music duly followed suit: recognizably atmospheric/synth-inclined black metal, but with a blitzed sensibility that was unmistakably the work of Mories. An EP tellingly titled The Golden Path of Death Acceptance followed at the end of 2019, drawing the year to a close and expounding upon the illumination he laid forth as Golden Ashes. The climax of that creation arrived in 2020 with his second album In the Lugubrious Silence of Eternal Night.

One year later, A Lightless Christ Shuns The Crown Of Divinity bursts forth from the void like an all-consuming blackness. Built on the foundation of raw black-metal and symphonic orchestrations, this third album finds Golden Ashes redefining its core sound into a clearer sounding malicious vortex of grotesque orchestration. Thematically A Lightless Christ Shuns The Crown Of Divinity builds on the previous album’s approaching Christian myths and apocryphal texts.