Karg stream new album Weltenasche exclusively with ZT

ZT have teamed up with Art of Propaganda present an exclusive stream of Karg‘s highly anticipated fifth album, Weltenasche.

For a decade now, this Austrian entity has been crafting awe-inspiring ambient-oriented black metal, and Weltenasche is Karg‘s most daring and defiant record yet, guaranteed to simultaneously satisfy and antagonize black metal purists as well as lure a wide swath of extreme-music listeners.

Karg was founded as a one-man black metal project in August 2006, which was common at that time. During the autumn of the same year, sole member J.J. (in the beginning, still named V.Wahntraum) started to record his first tracks and created the demo Zeitenwende – Martyrium eines sterbenden Traums, which was never released. Two years later, during the summer of 2008, he finished work on Karg‘s first real output, Von den Winden der Sehnsucht #1 – …und leiser wehen die Lieder. This first full-length album had an epic playing time of 78 minutes across seven songs. Those songs were musically located somewhere between dark neofolk ala Of The Wand And The Moon and haunting, depressive black metal not unlike Nyktalgia and Austere.

Since the beginning, Karg has always worked with clean-delay guitars like early shoegaze and post-rock bands do. Later in 2008, J.J. left his hometown in the Tennen mountains and settled in Vienna. He then began to write and record the second Karg album, Von den Winden der Sehnsucht #2 – …und doch hab ich deinen Herzschlag noch in Ohren, which was musically and mood-wise similar to its predecessor. Shortly before finishing the recording and mixing process, J.J. fell into a life crisis, which left him unable to accomplish the second album satisfyingly.

Von den Winden der Sehnsucht #2 was eventually released during the autumn of 2010, but was more of a compromise than a concept album. Around this time, J.J. was getting better and started to write new music. Along came the third Karg album, Apathie, which was highly influenced by opiates, hallucinogenic drugs, and other sedatives which J.J. used for depression. Apathie became a very experimental album, but on the other hand was a big step forward.

Also in 2010, Karg became a live band. Between autumn 2010 and summer 2014, the “band'” played around 50 gigs and was then laid to rest, as most of the members were highly involved in other projects at this time. In the winter between 2013 and 2014, J.J. was clean from downers and took around 10 days of withdrawal, in which he completely wrote and recorded the fourth Karg album, Malstrom. Malstrom is the total opposite to Apathie, since it’s much quicker and much more hard-edged; the depression’s abated with wrath and anger.

At long last, we have Karg‘s fifth album, Weltenasche: the conclusion of all the albums and songs recorded until now. Weltenasche is the first Karg opus which is lyrically completely performed in the dialect J.J. grew up with and which is spoken around the mountains of his hometown. Although highly influenced by post-rock and hardcore, Weltenasche is still a black metal record at heart – even though it’s far from what purists would call “black metal.” But Karg has always been a band of individualists, for individualists, and always will be; not for nothing is J.J. also a member of iconoclastic, critically acclaimed labelmates Harakiri For the Sky.