Japanese post-rock legends Mono are about to release their ninth studio album and follow-up to 2014’s The Last Dawn / Rays of Darkness. Requiem For Hell is due to be released on October 14th via Pelagic Records in Europe.
The five songs that comprise Requiem For Hell were written entirely by guitarist Takaakira ‘Taka’ Goto. Goto comments on the new record: “This album is a series of songs from a flood of inspirations in 2015. After writing song after song and giving them titles, we stumbled upon Dante’s Divine Comedy and the story struck a chord with us. Divine Comedy’s story about travelling down to Hell, through to purgatory, then from Heaven to reality, turned out to be the same theme. This is when we decided to use Gustave Dóre’s illustration from Divine Comedy’s last scene as the main cover.”
“Our long-time friend Jeremy (the owner of our American label Temporary Residence) recently had his first-born, named Ely”, comments Goto. “Jeremy had been sending us photos and her heartbeats from long before she was born. When Ely was born, we decided to dedicate one of our songs to her, with hopes of her listening to it when she is grown up, and decided to use her heartbeats as an intro on Ely’s Heartbeat” Goto explains
Today we have the pleasure of premiering the video for one of those five songs. The Harri Haataja-directed video for the title-track is beautifully black-and-white video that follows the an extremely intense journey. Watch it below.