With their diehard fans at their side, NILE fearlessly face the planet’s inevitable end with zero histrionics on their 10th album, The Underworld Awaits Us All, out August 23 via Napalm Records. The album follows the band’s critically acclaimed 2019 album, Vile Nilotic Rites, which debuted at #4 on the US Current Hard Music Albums chart and #5 on the US Top New Artist Albums chart, and that MetalSucks dubbed a “thoroughly satisfying technical death metal assault”.
Boasting airtight technicality and unrelenting brutality, The Underworld Awaits Us All pushes each member of NILE – founding mastermind/guitarist Karl Sanders, longtime drum master George Kollias, vocalist/guitarists Brian Kingsland and Zach Jeter, and bassist Dan Vadim Von – to their furthest extremes both in artistry and performance.
“When George, Brian and I first discussed the upcoming 10th Nile album – the music, the recording process, and the expectations we ourselves had – it was unanimously decided that we must up our game in every way,” offers Karl Sanders. “The playing, the musicianship, the writing, the brutality, the recording and production quality, and most of all, the effectiveness of all those elements becoming a cohesive fist, were all of utmost prime importance to us. We didn’t want to go backward or just do things the way we had done before; nor did we want to necessarily change who we are and what we love doing. We needed to stay true to the Nile sound and to Nile fans, while pushing forward and raising the bar on ourselves in every way.”
The members of NILE had quite a bit of time to hone their tracks to a razor’s edge, sending multiple songs to the chopping block several times and distilling their trademark Egyptology driven tempest down to its most streamlined essence. Once again produced and recorded at Sanders’ own Serpent Headed Studios in Greenville, South Carolina, the band returned to Vile Nilotic Rites engineer Mark Lewis (Cannibal Corpse, Dying Fetus, Whitechapel) for mixing and mastering.
“Any musical element that didn’t serve the purpose of the song got the axe,” continues Sanders. “As the songs took on more and more streamlined shapes, they became more focused. We started to see that these songs were meant to be delivered in their essential, organic, natural state of guitar-drums-bass-vocals metal-ness. Much like Catacombs or AOTW, the power of these songs was inherent in the metal itself. There is only enough extraneous additional instrumentation as each song needed. We also felt that the individual performances – the drumming, the guitar riffs, the vocals – deserved to be heard and appreciated, and allowed to kick ass on their own merits.”
The Underworld Awaits Us All’s mind-bending art was envisioned and created by returning artist Michał ‘Xaay’ Loranc, with reference to the cycle of life and judgment at its end. “I always try to create a unique symbol for each Nile release,” chimes Loranc. “This time I’ve based it on the Duat symbol and inverted Ankh (sort of like eternal life after death). Ankh is also a trademark of Nile, so it simply works like a charm here.”
Charging into battle as its namesake depicts, “Stelae of Vultures” makes an immediate impact with dissonant guitar chords and supernatural drumming, teasing the auditory evisceration to come. Next
song “Chapter for Not Being Hung Upside Down on a Stake in the Underworld and Made to Eat Feces by the Four Apes”, topped by impressive screams and gutturals (which Sanders describes as “unbelievable never-to-be-replicated insanity” delivered by Brian Kingsland), is a winding hacksaw of brutal tech-death citing the Egyptian Book of the Dead’s 181st chapter. “Nearly every Nile album has a song or songs drawn directly from Chapters of the Book of the Dead,” says Sanders. “So, I of course did what I always do when it’s time to start writing Nile songs. I go to the bookshelf, pull out one of several versions of the Book of the Dead I have here, open it to whatever random place the book naturally falls to, and whatever is on that page – well, that’s gonna be the song. It’s a very superstitious way of doing things; this random-let-the-universe-be-the-guide writing has produced some of our most everlasting fan favorite songs. As fate would have it, in this case the metal gods opened the book to Chapter 181 from the Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead ‘For Preventing a man from Going Upside Down and Eating Feces’.”
The album’s most succinct track, “To Strike with Secret Fang”, blends low-end punishment with blackened death metal inspiration, before album standouts such as “Naqada II Enter the Golden Age” and “Overlords of the Black Earth” breathe new life with thrash and fusion experimentation, as well as real human choirs – adding a raw element to the NILE fold. “The lyrics for ‘Overlords’ were in part inspired by a meeting with Egyptologist and Curator Helene Vireneque of the La Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). We had a great conversation on the deck top café of a boat on the Seine River near the BnF in Paris,” adds Sanders. “We had quite a blast discussing many metal-related Ancient Egypt topics, but I was especially inspired by her observation that the writings of the Ancient Egyptians have found new life, thousands of years later, as lyrics in metal songs.”
Each track soars as a technical tour-de-force – featuring career-defining extreme drumming from Kollias, as well as razor-sharp soloing from all three active guitarists and palpable bass exploration. A perfect example of this equation is pinnacle burner “Under the Curse of the One God”, combining sinister atmospherics with breakneck pacing and whirlwind, vicious riff acrobatics. “Every song has George giving a veritable metal masterclass of drum work,” Sanders asserts. “The amount of work George poured into these songs is staggering. It’s not just incredible drumming – George spent an insane amount of time turning the songs inside and out to craft each one into a work of sheer poetry of cohesion with the song itself.”
On the new album, NILE masters full-tilt speed and ferocious musicality. 30 years into their heavy reign, The Underworld Awaits Us All proves that NILE is marching onward and undoubtedly upward, bleeding metal for their fandom for as long as the sands of time will allow. “All through the process of making this record, all of the songs on The Underworld were crafted and slaved over with the realization always in our minds that we are making music not just for ourselves – but the fans as well,” Sanders states. ”On this album, we wrote and played our asses off – because of that intimate relationship with Nile fans. I believe that metal fans can hear that metal sincerity, and clarity of purpose.
As our good friend and wise sage J. Garofoli would say, ‘It’s important to deliver to the listener the pure heart of metal, to give completely of one’s metal soul when playing music. This is the way.’ This Nile album is for each and every listener that has been with us since the beginning, 30 years ago, and everyone who has joined along the way. The Underworld Awaits Us All – we will see you there.”