Los Angeles-based thrash metallers WARBRINGER will release their fifth album, "Woe To The Vanquished", on March 31 via Napalm. The disc was produced and mixed by Mike Plottnikoff (FEAR FACTORY, IN FLAMES), mastered by Howie Weinberg (SLAYER, PANTERA), with cover art by Andreas Marschall (SODOM, BLIND GUARDIAN, OBITUARY). "Woe To The Vanquished" track listing: 01. Silhouettes 02. Woe To The Vanquished 03. Remain Violent 04. Shellfire 05. Descending Blade 06. Spectral Asylum 07. Divinity Of Flesh 08. When The Guns Fell Silent Bonus 7" single track listing: 01. Evil Dead (DEATH cover featuring Chris Monroy of SKELETAL REMAINS) 02. Arc Lite (CORONER cover featuring Jadran "Conan" Gonzalez of EXMORTUS) The video for the song "Silhouettes", directed by Orie McGinness (Enlighten Creative Studio) and produced by Shan Dan Horen (Shadow Born Group), can be seen below. WARBRINGER singer John Kevill states: "This song, the album opener, is a blazing and intense number; we wanted the album to open with pure annihilation. I had the lyric in my head and the frantic riff under the verse since the beginning of 2014, and I am very pleased that it exists as a full song now. "The idea for the song came from a particularly chilling detail found at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; when the atomic bombs went off the shadows of people whose bodies were vaporized still remain burned onto the walls and the ground where they once stood. To me, this is goddamn horrifying. I thought, 'What if the souls of those dead remain trapped in the shadows?' "I wanted to have the song written from a future where civilization has failed, the Earth is in ruins and the few remaining survivors live a horrible existence. The untold millions of shadows from this future, burnt into stone, look back at us in the present time and judge us for bringing about the apocalypse that, though we saw it coming, we did nothing to avoid. "The way I see it, we continue funding weaponry that keeps getting more and more devastating (search 'satan-2' if you think this issue is some relic), and leadership seems on a sharp downward trend as well. Not the ingredients for a positive outcome. "Remember, it only takes one mistake, once, and everything everyone has ever built, written, painted, all music, all culture, every ounce of human achievement is gone, in a single blinding flash. Like it or not, this is the world we live in today, and entering 2017 the delicate balance tips and sways more and more." "Woe To The Vanquished" will be made available as: * Regular jewel-case edition * 1LP gatefold edition (black and other colored editions) * Super deluxe wooden box warchest edition (CD, exclusive 2 track 7” single, flag, band logo dog tags) only available via the Napalm Records webstores in the U.S. and Europe — strictly limited to 500 copies! Kevill, who is studying to be a history professor, explains the "Woe To The Vanquished" title: "The title 'Woe To The Vanquished' comes from early Roman history — before they were the huge empire they became. In 390 BC, a host of Gauls led by a warlord called Brennus attacked Rome, and captured all the city except the Capitoline Hill. From this hill, the defeated Romans made a bargain, they would pay 1,000 pounds of gold for the Gallic army to leave the city with no further bloodshed. The Romans bring the gold before Brennus, who uses his own scales to measure it. On the Gaul's scales, the Roman's thousand pounds of gold measured to be less, which led the Romans to complain that the scale was rigged (it probably was). Responding to this, Brennus speaks 'Vae Victis' (Woe To The Vanquished) and throws his sword on the counterweight. Because the Romans lost, they have to pay the rigged sum of gold as well as the weight of the sword, to add insult to injury. The irony here is that vowing this type of humiliation would never happen again, Rome went on to become an ancient war machine conquering and subjugating most of the old world. On the record, 'Woe To The Vanquished' is spoken in an ironic, mocking tone — the defeated are trampled and time marches on, uncaring, and forgets they ever existed." He adds: "One of the great things about heavy metal as a genre is you can express tougher subject material than 'I met a (boy/girl) and it was (happy/sad).' I looked for the most monolithic evil I could find to write about with this destructive, intense music... and I did not have to look any further than reality. Forget Satan, that's a children's story. Real evil is in the hearts of men."
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