The greater Tampa, Florida area is known for producing some death metal greats. Now, it is home to an up-and-coming new act with your attention. Nekroi Theoi features former members of Ovid's Withering & Monotheist and current members of 7 Horns 7 Eyes, and Regurgitated Pus.
Their influences include Defeated Sanity, Deathspell Omega, and Neurosis and you can hear a little bit of each in the new song we're premiering, "Ancient of Days." The track comes from their new album, Dead Gods out May 31st. Pre-order it here.
Here is what frontman JJ Polachek IV has to say about the song "This song was a motherfucker to write and track. It's my favorite song on the album because it is a true work of all of us in the band collaborating equally. Everyone has a riff in here, or a structural idea, or a moment they can take credit for. It's a great example of what we strive to be as a band overall. A collective effort of people bringing their best forward to make something that has its own identity representative of all of us."
As for the lyrical themes, JJ says: "I wrote it in the structure of a psalm, with the thematic thru line being the idea that the most faithful way to be a "real Christian" is to hold to the text of scripture as strictly as possible, rejecting any sort of progressive praxis or philosophy. The concept of there being virtue in destroying the lives of any who defect from the status quo, because the status quo was put in place by God. This is a very real and common ideological pattern in Christianity at large, and it manifests in both overt and insidious ways. 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' is one example of dehumanization in the disguise of "Agape love", but now we are seeing the more blatant examples as the evangelical majority of the US tries to revert us back to a puritanical state of theocratic dominance. The claim of validity in all this will come back to a very shaky concept called "apostolic succession" if you really push it in any academic way, but it revolves around a general idea that God is "unchanging" (a word you hear me repeat often in the song), and thusly Christians should also remain "steadfast" towards the changes of a progressing world (viewed by evangelicals as "regressive degeneracy"). The wordplay in my lyrics then becomes much more obvious towards the final line of the song. The crux of the case for refusing to adapt with the rest of the world is based also in the concept that the scripture itself is under the sovereignty of God, and by transitive property is also infallible. So we get to me being pretentious as fuck with the "twist" at the end, begging the question: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word has been unchanging. Has it not?"
He continues "Well allow me to ruin the atmosphere of mystique and artistic intrigue by blatantly answering that and completely ignoring any death of the author stuff: No it fucking hasn't. That bullshit has been through more changes and politically motivated revisions than Star Trek canon. It's bad to center your morals on it. Don't.
Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. Everyone deserves safe access to abortions. Capitalism is killing us. There's more important shit going on than grown men in facepaint getting their shows shut down because they're super chill with Nazis. Fuck God. Catch ya'll later I'm out."
