Ilsa announce new album ‘Preyer’

October 8, 2020 James Weaver

ILSA have announced a new album!

Titled Preyer, the upcoming album from the Washington, D.C. based band is their sixth full-length effort and is scheduled to be released in November, via Relapse Records.

The upcoming album was recorded as the world shuttered away in 2020, the band harnessed the fears and uncertainties of troubled times, and used these as driving forces for their unnerving metal’s raw, chaotic, and whipping intensity. The result is a new full length that intends to deliver overdoses of crushing doom and menacing death metal.

The ghost of the Satanic murderer Sean Sellers still haunts the band. The notorious killer was the first and remains the only person executed in the US for a crime committed under the age of 17 since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. “These songs were written with his life in mind,” the band states. “Sean‘s story is an exploitative intersection of religious, media and state authority, culminating in his 1999 execution for murders committed in a state of self-described ‘Demonic Possession’.”

Alongside the announcement of the new album, the band have released the first song from the upcoming album; titled Poor Devil.

Speaking about the new song, frontman Orion says, “Poor Devil sprung from study of Potter’s Fields and the story of Judas Iscariot, where I found parallels with Satanic murderer Sean Seller‘s “betrayal” by his best friend and Judas‘ role as biblical scapegoat. For such a lynchpin in the Passion of Christ, Judas was never afforded the reverence of the other disciples; forever damned as an unredeemable traitor, while the story could never be complete without his participation. The Potter’s Field where Judas hung himself became the burial grounds of the discarded and unclaimed dead, and the name stuck to this day. Apologies to D.I.‘s Richard Hung Himself, where we snuck a nod to the one of the best punk songs ever written.”