photos by Juliet Guzman
Maze Envy, the punishing second LP from Los Angeles, California-based caustic death/doom quintet CIVEROUS, is now streaming in its entirety ahead of its worldwide release on 20 Buck Spin this Friday.
Upon hearing CIVEROUS’ debut album, Decrepit Flesh Relic, one was left with a feeling of intense suffocating weight and agonal prostration in the service of bone-breaking death hymns. With the towering new album Maze Envy, Los Angeles’ most creatively destructive death/doom ensemble lets loose a freshly evolved but no less brutal conflagration of immersive horror and morbid lamentation.
Where death/doom may often stay in safe and unadventurous realms of narrow focus, Maze Envy presents a more far-reaching breadth of ambition, where unusual technicality, progressive atmospheres, string flourishes, and chaotic mysticism radiate a purple light of the soul’s ascension from the black oceans of dread CIVEROUS inhabits. Chain-dragging dirge and blackened blasting courtesy of drummer Aidan Neuner, bassist Drew Horton, and guitarists Daniel Salinas and Alonso Santana, met with the savage ferocity of Lord Foul’s hellish vocal exorcisms, exalt Mazy Envy with a hellish grandeur within its myriad paths to oblivion.
Maze Envy was recorded between Winter 2022 and Summer 2023, engineered, mixed, and produced by Andrew Solis (Apparition) at Deadstare Audio with additional engineering by Kevin McCombs at The Steakhouse, North Hollywood, and mastered by Nick Townsend at Infrasonic Sound. The record features captivating cover art by Juanjo Castellano (Majesties, Voidceremony, Avulsed, Gates Of Ishtar), photography by Juliet Guzman, and layout by Dan Fried, completing a record prime for fans of Spectral Voice, Disembowelment, My Dying Bride, Worm, Ceremonium, Tzompantli, Krypts, and Rippikoulu.
With a massively crushing sound, Maze Envy is end-of-times music for an age in which that reckoning feels unfathomably close. CIVEROUS batters the senses into a state of labyrinthian turmoil from which emergence is ever more implausible.
Stream CIVEROUS’ savagely unique Maze Envy LP early now at YouTube HERE.
20 Buck Spin will release Maze Envy on LP, CD, MC, and digital platforms this Friday, March 22nd. Find merch and preorder options at the label webshop HERE and Bandcamp HERE, and watch the video for the lead single “Labyrinth Charm” featuring guest Derek Rydquist (The Zenith Passage, The Faceless) HERE.
CIVEROUS is plotting tour dates in support of Maze Envy, the band already confirmed to play multiple Spring and Summer festivals including Disemboweled God Fest 2024 in Seattle with Mortiferum, Druid Lord, Drawn And Quartered, Tithe, and more, the inaugural Austin Death Fest with Tomb Mold, Witch Vomit, Mortiferum, Outer Heaven, Sentenced 2 Die, Lunar Chamber, Maul, Torture Rack, and others, Death Over Bakersfield 2024 with the likes of Apparition, Fórn, Abyssal and Funeral Leech, and Deadstock II alongside Abstracter, Mephitic Corpse, Apparition, and many others. Stand by for live updates throughout the year, with plans of invading Europe in the Fall in the works.
CIVEROUS Live:
3/29-31/2024 Disemboweled God Fest 2024 @ Belltown Yacht Club – Seattle, WA
4/27-28/2024 Austin Death Fest @ Mohawk – Austin, TX
6/21-24/2024 Death Over Bakersfield 2024 @ Grumpy’s Brewing Co. – Bakersfield, CA
7/19-21/2024 Deadstock II @ TBA
“CIVEROUS is a band that I expected to be good on their 20 Buck Spin debut but I was not expecting one of the most dynamic, heavy, and brilliantly paced albums I’ve heard all year to ooze out of my speakers when I pressed play. Maze Envy is a complete album that expresses itself fully and at any given moment there is something incredible happening. Pencil this one in on the AOTY list.” – Everything Is Noise
“This is a hulking, snaking display that works its way inside your mind and blackens any hope you have for the remaining days.” – Meat Mead Metal
“…Maze Envy hooks listeners in with a grand scope of work that never ceases to settle as it goes beyond the genre’s expected tropes.” – Heaviest Of Art
“Instead of endlessly scouring the sub-genre bones cast one could just as well receive CIVEROUS‘ latest work as variously moshable and gloom stricken muse which connects “new old school” and post-music revisionism into a dramatic but slowly formed tonal juxtaposition, a disagreement of forms which is ugly and confrontational moment-to-moment but overall represents an interesting modern death/doom metal fusion.” – Mystification Zine
“The fact that CIVEROUS are able to create something that sounds so different to a lot of other bands in this genre is testament to their songwriting talent, musicianship and desire to embrace the future, unafraid to take their music in often completely unexpected directions… Maze Envy is next level stuff and with it, CIVEROUS have raised the bar for extreme music in 2024. 10/10″ – Distorted Sound Magazine
“…a band I’d easily drop everything else for when a new album comes round… One of the most underrated, burgeoning acts in extreme metal right now.” – The Razor’s Edge
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