Venom Prison Confront Flaws in Prison System on Brutal New Song

U.K. death metal/hardcore aggressors Venom Prison will release their fourth album, Erebos, on Feb. 4 and have just debuted the pulverizing first single, "Judges of the Underworld."

"'Judges of the Underworld' deals with the crippling reality of people who face incarceration, who oftentimes are followed by violence over a lifetime," said the band of the new song's message.

"This violence can present itself as a dominating factor in a context of structural poverty and racial inequality, creating roles in an individual’s life where they are not only the victim, but also witness and offender at different times in different situations," Venom Prison continued, "But the violence we address in our courts and prisons is judged out of social context and can therefore not lead to a fair and personalized resolution for people who are stuck in a cycle of violence and systematic oppression."

The track represents further stylistic evolution as Venom Prison continue to pull in a myriad of influences and pack them neatly into their brand of death-addled hardcore, rife with circle pit-driving rhythms, fist-swinging chugs and flashes of melody and a Fear Factory-esque chorus with a distorted clean vocal resting underneath vocalist Larissa Stupar's feral howls.

"It was important for us to visualize this feeling of isolation, anxiety and repeated violence in the music video for ’Judges of the Underworld’ and the idea was to show an individual that is stripped down to their basic needs and instincts, consumed by their helplessness to navigate in an everyday situation, feeling isolated within themselves whilst going under in a sea of people that face similar conditions," the group said of the official music video, which will premiere at 1PM ET today (Nov. 4).

They continued, "This is where Thomas Coe Brooker comes in as a director and cinematographer, with his unique eye for detail he was able to bring out this combative helplessness and aggressiveness of said individual. He was able to convey the feeling of being alone in a crowd, suffering the same fate as many others, where isolation becomes your existence and a vicious cycle of your life at the hands of systematic violence."

Erebos will be released on Feb. 4 on Century Media. View the album art, created by Eliran Kantor, below.