Wretched announce new album ‘Decay’

August 8, 2025 James Weaver

North Carolina-based metal outfit WRETCHED have announced a new album!

Titled Decay, the upcoming album from the Charlotte-based band is scheduled to be released in October this year, via Metal Blade Records. The album marks the band’s fifth full-length effort – the long-awaited follow-up to 2014’s Cannibal – and serves as a conceptual prequel to 2010’s Beyond The Gate.

The record explores existential themes, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired mythology, and personal loss, blending haunting melodies with progressive complexity. The album was self-produced with engineering by drummer Marshall Wieczorek, mixed by Johann Meyer, mastered by Alan Douches, and features artwork and layout by Travis Smith (OVERKILL, NEVERMORE, OPETH).

Speaking about the new album, drummer Marshall Wieczorek says, “we’ve had a lot of time to grow and reflect in the time between our last album and Decay. WRETCHED is doing what WRETCHED always does, and that’s exploring our environment and leaving room for ourselves to try different things. To sum things up, the new album is dynamic. We go here, we go there, we go everywhere. There is no shortage of groove, heaviness, speed, melodicism, prettiness, and sadness.”

Alongside the announcement of the new album, the band have released a new music video for the title track and first single from the record; Decay. Speaking about the new song, vocalist Billy Powers says, “[The song] Decay is a chapter in our story in which our main character Malus has lost his physical body due to becoming possessed by an ancient Necromancer. He is just a conscious thought floating through the void between time and space, conjuring a familial djinn named Elturiel to gain his assistance in returning to his mortal shell. This track revolves a lot around out of body experience, lucid dreaming, inner voices/internal dialogue, and the potential for reincarnation. It’s the feeling when you’re so sure that you’ve lost it all, yet you see that little shimmering glimmer of hope at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Then you have the rug pulled out from underneath you to find that the darkness is what you may only ever know. Not to say that all hope is lost because, in the context of the lyrics, it is not. There’s a repeated line near the middle and ending of the song that says ‘once more upon this eternal flat circle.’ It is inspired by True Detective S1 where it’s said ‘time is a flat circle.’ This has all happened before and will all happen again. I’m not a flat earther.”

Watch the official video for Decay here: