Krieg, ‘The Isolationist’ — New Album

The U.S. black metal legends have returned! Spearheaded by main man Imperial, Krieg have been terrorizing audiences and throwing a defiant middle finger in the air to all that oppose their nihilistic, anti-human views and vicious take on the blackened art since 1995.

Candlelight Records will be releasing the seminal act's sixth full-length recording, 'The Isolationist,' on Oct. 26. The album was recorded at Volume Studios in Chicago with producer Sanford Parker (Nachtmystium, Pelican, Yakuza) and features performances from guitarist Joseph Van Fossen (Noctuary), bassist Wrest (Leviathan) and drummer Chris Grigg (Woe).

"It's definitely the most diverse Krieg recording ever, with far flung influences from stuff like Beherit/Profanatica to Public Image Ltd. to Rudimentary Peni to Lush," Imperial tells Noisecreep. "It straddles the line between extremely ugly and extremely beautiful, even somewhat quiet and fragile in places. I suppose the obvious differences would be a more massive sounding production and the freedom to use the studio as another instrument versus a place just to record. The more subtle things that would place it away from Krieg's previous endeavors would just be the general mindset behind making the album as emotionally dynamic and draining as possible."

He was also reluctant to characterize the realization of 'The Isolationist' as a 'difficult' birth, though admits that it wasn't exactly easy bringing the nearly hour-long monster to life.

"Each member of the studio lineup only had a small fraction of time due to their work schedules, so we had to shuttle them at different times with a few hours here and there of downtime to really experiment with the more ambient parts of the record," Imperial recalls. "I had a good idea of what I wanted to do months in advance, but a large bulk of the final writing took place in a cheap motel outside of [Chicago's] O'Hare Airport the night before we started laying down the skeletons.

"There would also be moments while Joseph and Chris would be rehearsing in the studio and I'd be f---ing around with a guitar and find something that had to be put into the songs. So I'd run into the room and work out the new structure with them. Once Wrest arrived, we did a lot of similar things, spending time working on layering ideas. So a fairly easy birth, with some complications that might have left the infant in the incubator while the doctors had a smoke."