It’s been a couple of years since we last heard new music from Nudie-suit-sporting death-metal brutalizers SpiritWorld, but the group have finally delivered more DEATHWESTERN-style sounds for the faithful. To tease an upcoming album, the rising act have unveiled a monstrously thrashing new cut called “Western Stars & the Apocalypse,” which has been fit with a gory but goofy set of animated visuals.
A press release explains that the song taps into the “Old West occultism” present on past SpirtWorld releases. This means we’ve got a mix of demonically-licked Slayer-isms and tombstone-heavy breakdowns colliding against vocalist-founder Stu Folsom’s roughnecked rasping of eternal sorrow and misery — even evocatively outlining the swingin’ nooses hanging from the cottonwoods.
“I wrote ‘Western Stars & the Apocalypse’ right after DEATHWESTERN came out, when we got home from touring Europe with Agnostic Front,” Folsom revealed in a statement, though he added that the song reflects both the influence of NYHC and one of pop culture’s most beloved lyricists. “I was revisiting a lot of Bob Dylan in my bunk on that tour and there is a nod to his song ‘Desolation Row’ in the lyrics.”
As for the video, it was helmed by Rob Zombie collaborator and Obituary video director Balázs Gróf, whose spaghetti-limbed animated absurdism plunges caricatures of Folsom and the rest of the SpiritWorld crew into an anarchic cartoon outback of snarling hellhounds and violent giant mantises.
You can see the screwball SpiritWorld vid up above.
While details have yet to drop on the third SpiritWorld album, Folsom had previously explained that the collection will act as the third part in a trilogy that began with 2020’s Pagan Rhythms and 2022’s DEATHWESTERN. He’d hinted at the time that he’d “definitely killed off some characters” used on those earlier concept albums, which entailed a bunch of morally corrupt outlaws and necrophile priests banding together to battle monsters popping out of a gate from hell.