Playgrounded announce new album ‘The death of Death’

January 18, 2022 James Weaver

PLAYGROUNDED have announced a new album!

Titled The death of Death, the upcoming album from the Greek post-metal/progressive band is their sophomore effort, and is scheduled to be released in March this year, via Pelagic Records.

The album was recorded at MD Recording Studios by Nikos Michalodimitrakis, long collaborator of vpcalist Stavros Markonis in film productions. Mixing was handled by C.A.Cederberg (LEPROUS, SHINING etc) in Kristiansand, Norway, while the album was mastered by George Tanderø (MADRUGADA, SATYRICON, JAGA JAZZIST etc) in Oslo, Norway.

Intending to demonstrate a profound understanding of the glitches they produce, PLAYGROUNDED aim to evoke a sense of the uncanny closely related to the cut-up movie fragments of sound artists like the German Orson Hentschel. “We start with dynamic sound design structures, most of the times initiated by Orestis [Zafeirou, producer/composer],” explains guitarist Michael Kotsirakis. “We then work in pairs expanding the musical space and creating variations and flourishes. Sometimes the lyrics and vocals will dictate a change in quality, other times it’s one of the instruments. After many ideas are on the table Stavros and Orestis sit together and propose a song structure. After this loop has been repeated over and over we have a very good idea of all the parts. That’s when we hit the rehearsal space and refine the details.”

“The shortest sound units become extended themes,” explains main composer Orestis Zafeirou. “Steady rhythmical blocks interact with unstable ones. Noise becomes tone and melody. Sonic grains gather to form masses, masses dissolve into a single entity. With every repetition, comes change.”

Alongside the announcement of the new album, the band have released a new music video for the first song lifted from the upcoming album; the title track The death of Death. Speaking about the new song and its accompanying music video, Kotsirakis says, “The death of Death is a study of unity in opposition, a disclosure of contradictory aspects of reality, an expression of their mutual relationship. For the occasion of sharing this first taste of the album with the world we worked closely with director Dimitris Anagnostou and director of photography Yannis Karabatsos, the duo that we came to know from the award-winning short film Mare Nostrum for which Stavros composed the score. The director’s idea about a “study of movement” using early cinematography techniques drew inspiration from Orestis‘ dialectically composed lyrics and was eventually adapted into the clip’s script. We felt that Karabatsos‘ sinister photography was the perfect means to explore the song’s contradictions… black and white, direction and diffusion, alienation and struggle, stillness and life.”