Eshtadur: Breaking Out Of The Abyss
In a time where global pandemics put a stop to the pitter-patter of the daily grind and social media governs the minds of the many through it’s microcosm of celebrity culture, it can be difficult to take time to deliberate over the struggles of those in the world around us. When we think of the plight of people, we often look towards the homeless on our streets and those less fortunate than us in our immediate vicinity. However, there’s a whole continent caught in the trappings of a time gone by, where the citizens of Latin America are lost in the undertow of their culture. “It is particularly difficult in Latin America, because we are musically, economically, and socially different developmentally than Europe and the UK, and Asia, and even Africa,” explains Jorg August, vocalist of Colombian melodic death metal trio ESHTADUR, exhaustingly.
“We are in a tropical country and a tropical land, and we do things very differently – we arrive late to appointments and we think completely differently. Our culture suffers through that, and in particular, music.”
Suffering is something that Jorg, and by extension his bandmates in ESHTADUR – Alejo Guitarecho and Andres El Negro – are synonymous with. It’s no secret that heavy metal in Colombia is as much a rarified commodity as trust is in politics, and it’s definitely no secret that bringing their blackened blend of melodic death metal to the masses requires life-altering sacrifices to achieve. For Jorg, there are two common threads they suffer through, which both are intrinsically linked: mental health and money.
“It’s difficult for us to do the basic things, because of money. For example, let’s say our coin is three or four times the coin from America, we have to earn three or four times more our coin in order to have one American coin, like one dollar, and for the UK for example, the sterling, that is five times our coin, so you can imagine how hard we have to work in order to do anything with our releases, with our audio production, and with video creation. Everything is harder.”
It’s not just the economical and financial repercussions of their cultural norms that nullify their attempts to make their music accessible to a wider audience, but the struggles of striking a balance in all aspects of your life. For Jorg, this includes his lifelong battles with anxiety and depression, which seeps into and throughout ESHTADUR’s music. “When I was very young, I used to draw pictures and paint monsters and evil figures. I did that kind of stuff since I was four or five, and I always liked this kind of terror. After I grew up, and became an adult, I found myself suffering from depression and anxiety. These kinds of things make me believe in what I was interested in when I was younger and understand why these things happened.”
Understanding the ways in which mental health affects human activity on a daily basis is something which Jorg is inordinately passionate about, from sharing his personal experiences of it on ESHTADUR’s fourth album From The Abyss to his day job working in a mental health and drug prevention centre. To ESHTADUR, putting pen to paper on their experiences and feelings is paramount to raising awareness of the ailments we can all suffer from and struggle through. “A lot of people here suffer with mental health matters, and we’re now changing these subjects and how people react to this, because in the past we didn’t know more about this. Maybe we think this was just a superficial thing that didn’t really matter, but it does, you know.
It’s a vicious cycle of catch-22’s that ESHTADUR tackles tactically on a day-to-day basis, waging war against the world inside their minds as they work hard to explore the world outside, hoping their music will sail off to far-reaching shores. They want more and more people to hear their music, and most importantly, to understand the very personal places this music comes from.
Born on a diet of black, death and symphonic metal; From The Abyss is an album that lives and breathes the accessibility of latter-day BEHEMOTH but with the grandiosity of a SEPTICFLESH or FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE outing, and the ferocity of CARCASS and UNLEASHED. Opener Lowborn Bastard is built on blast beats but brought to life by bedazzling 80’s-styled slides and solos, whilst Transient Stranger is melodeath unhinged. Produced by KILL THE LIGHT’s Chris Clancy, it is ESHTADUR’s most majestic work yet, albeit their darkest, reopening and reaching into very real wounds. A feeling that Jorg wanted their fans to experience first hand.
“I really tried to do something very dark, very dramatic and very perturbing for the fans. I want for them to have that feeling that this record is something very dark and oppressive, that it is very sick,” he says. “It’s sick when talking about what I’ve been going through with mental health, it’s sick about how hard it is for us to release something, sick how we work four or five times harder just to survive. To go against the many factors we have to go against, the obstacles like this pandemic, this is what I want for the people who listen to focus their attention on.”
ESHTADUR are a band who are battling daily against the boundaries of their socio-economical surroundings and their cultural upbringings to not only deliver their music to the world, but to survive as both a band and as human beings. From The Abyss, for all it’s melodic moments and disturbingly darker subject matter, is testament to their tremendous spirit and their impassioned debt to heavy metal, and most importantly is a reminder to us to open our eyes to the wider world around us.
From The Abyss is out now via Blood Blast.
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