France's cinematic metal titans Hypno5e know how to tell a story, going full on Christopher Nolan epic-mindbender in their 2019 album A Distant (Dark) Source.
Released as the second part of an ambitious diptych album project from the band (the group is in studio working on the first yet final half of the diptych as we speak), A Distant (Dark) Source serves up the heavies while layering on welcome helpings of emotion and beauty.
"For me music needs to be full of contrasts," shared guitarist/vocalist Emmanuel Jessua. "You need to be walking between different paths of violence and more light and beauty. And I think that all the violent stuff makes more sense if before there is some calm. I think the contrasts build the real essence of the music. I couldn’t be composing something always violent or always calm, because I need to be constantly contradicting myself and contradicting the thing that I had composed just before. And I think that’s why we compose songs that are very, very long, because we need this time to be on the different steps to atmospheres because they take you through the real essence of our music."
Metal Injection proudly premieres the last single off A Distant (Dark) Source, "On the Dry Lake," the 12-minute plus album kickoff that sets the tone for the sonic experience that follows.
Conceptually, A Distant (Dark) Source tells the story of Tauca, an old Palaeolithic lake located in Bolivia, where Jessua grew up and continues to find inspiration for his musical endeavors. Lake Tauca disappeared more than 15 000 years ago, leaving behind an arid land and salt lakes, like the Salt Desert of Uyuni or Coipasa, at 4.500m of altitude in the Andes mountain range.
A Distant (Dark) Source is the musical imagination of a night in this desert, during which the old shores of the lake see the return of the shadows of the people who used to live in this area before its disappearance. A man comes back to the lake to look for the shadow of the woman he loved. The album tells the story of this ephemeral return.
"There’s something about a memory a space can have," shared Jessua. "How the memory of people is still encoded in the place where you live and how we will go to places where we used to live to search for some part of us that may have disappeared. It causes us to go to those places to find some past memory that we want to be alive. That’s that’s the main concept of the album, memory, and how this memory carved in the space we are in. This desert in Bolivia was a place where I used to live when I was younger. It was always for me, like a real inspiration. Almost all the albums that we write have a reference to that place and to that desert in Bolivia. But it is the first time that it really is the main character in the album.
"It’s one of my favourite songs from the album," Jessua adds of "On the Dry Lake" ahead of the single premier. "It very much embodies what we’ve been working on as a concept and as a concept completion with the band since the beginning. I hope you enjoy it."
