THE BEAST

Lyrically this song was inspired by an old friend of mine called Matt, who is blind. His online presence is an extremely entertaining antithesis of ‘fake news’. His political posts are always on-point, quadruple fact checked and always from credible sources. Unfortunately he spends most of his life being shot down by pro-trump, anti-mask, flat earth believing, covid denying, right wing, royalist, Brexit supporting idiots. His daily confrontations with morons caused me to wonder why so many people are so resistant to knowledge? Suddenly the chorus appeared in my head “The blind man shines light on the truth, fools take offence to his wisdom. The obsequious cattle of death applaud their own ignorant lies.” Musically the track is a concept which has been growing steadily for about twenty years. Back then I was going to lots of different clubs including hip-hop and dub, I was also listening to a lot of doom. It was at an Electric Wizard gig in Leeds that I made an observation. The previous night I had been at a hip hop club, and I couldn’t help but notice that sonically the experiences had a lot in common. Both were dominated by low grooving subsonic frequencies and had stoned audiences swaying about. The idea of mixing doom and hip hop grew slowly in me over the years. It wasn’t something I was really feeling like exploring for a long time, mainly due to 99% of all hip hop metal crossovers being utter mince. When I was putting Hexenzirkel together I dug deep into all the mad ideas floating around my head that I had never utilised, and decided it was time. The track also features amazing guest vocals from Laura of King Witch and Jenni of Juniper Grave who really bring the song to life.