Dvne announce new album ‘Etemen Ænka’

January 21, 2021 James Weaver

DVNE have announced a new album!

Titled Etemen Ænka, the upcoming album from the Scottish progressive rock/metal band is their sophomore full-length offering and is scheduled to be released in March this year, via Metal Blade Records.

“It’s an album that has a narrative musically, and we hope that will encourage the listener to explore the universe we’ve created around it,” states guitarist/vocalist Victor Vicart of the upcoming album. “It is a very dense and layered album which will reward multiple listens, and while this is becoming a recurring aspect of our music, we feel that we went further with it this time. It’s also a very polarising album, emotionally speaking. The heavy sections are, well, very heavy, while the clean sections are much more intricate and delicate – and in a way wouldn’t be out of place in a Studio Ghibli anime soundtrack.”

Exploring everything in greater depth in every way, the upcoming album intends to be a profound step forward from 2017’s Asheran. “We knew we wanted to include keys and synths in the equation. We wanted to be able to add new textures and new sounds that weren’t on our previous releases, and we felt that this was something that will give us more options creatively. Looking back, that was a great decision because we’ve used synths for everything, with ambient sounds, heavy subs and actual leads, which really added a new dynamic to this album. We’ve also kept this balance between down-tuned heavy riffs and clean movements, which were already present in Asheran, but we really wanted to make sure we could capture more details and subtleties once recorded.”

Alongside the announcement of the new album, DVNE have released a new music video for the first song lifted from the upcoming album; Sì-XIV.

Speaking about the new music video, the band says, “With the context of COVID-19 and the strong travel restrictions we’ve had in the UK and Europe, shooting Sì-XIV was a real challenge, but we’re glad we could make it happen.
The video was split between two shoots: we worked once again with our close friends Just-Aurèle Meissonnier, Louis Macéra, Gilles Garniers and Michel Jocaille for the creature part of the shoot (shot in Paris); the rest of the video footage was shot in Edinburgh by Calum McMillan and our light tech Sam Jones.

We’ve always loved prosthetic effects and wanted to use our own creations in the video, but the overall aesthetic takes no small amount of inspiration from some of our favourite 70/80s sci-fi horror films. We had this concept of a weird humanoid-type creature facing the overwhelming harshness and the hopeless nature of its existence. The video symbolically follows the narrative theme of the track within the new album, with the creature attempting to escape its nature through metamorphosis throughout the video. It was an incredibly fun few days setting up and shooting all the creature parts in Paris.”

Watch the official music video for Sì-XIV here: