Sentient Ruin is proud and honored to announce that Death. Void. Terror. continue their marvelous aural transfiguration. "To The Great Monolith III: Rifts" is the band's first full-length utterance of the Monolith in five years, and its most shattering revelation yet.
The mesmerizing upcoming new album follows the recent precursor EP "To The Great Monolith 2.5" released just last month, and has now been anticipated by expert extreme metal outlet No Clean Singing, who in premiering the closing track "V. (-- ---) Daphnyr" have remarked how the work is "a kaleidoscopic experience, a shapeshifter in itself that continues to reveal the metamorphosis of the band’s music since their last album" - you can check out the feature and listen to the song HERE.
"To The Great Monolith III: Rifts" is a seismic convergence of primordial trance and awakened consciousness, tearing open the boundaries of improvisation to expose the essence of catharsis. The rift is both metaphor and confession: a fracture in doctrine, a deliberate wound inflicted upon orthodoxy by the practitioners themselves, as conscious composition enters the sacred architecture for the first time, insurgent and unapologetic. Pulsing bass lines consciously sculpted, and around them, the instinctual maelstrom, constructing vortices of the inner chaos. A perceived heresy that in truth signals only deeper initiation. What pours through the rift is devastating. Abyssal, chaos-wielding atmospheric black/death metal mutated into ecstatic occult rock and tribal hallucinatory sprawl. The specter of the ancient ones running through gorges and dissolving into monolithic darkness, transfigured beyond recognition yet more itself than ever. Vocals conjured in no known tongue, surrendered without will to the Monolith in liturgical precision. A sonic entity shedding skin, growing new flesh, irrigated by ritual and animated by an internal battle between instinct and will, trance and reflection, doctrine and heresy. On its surface, a rift captured and made literal. In its depths, an existential fracture splitting open five years of metamorphosis and unleashing its monstrous sonic deluge. The Great Monolith does not crumble, it ruptures, expands, and devours anew. DVT's most monumental and revelatory work to date.
"To The Great Monolith III: Rifts" is slated for a September 25 2026 release on LP, CD, cassette and digital formats worldwide via Sentient Ruin, all of which are now pre-orderable via all our channels.
Swiss death sculptors Death. Void. Terror. first emerged in 2018 as a recluse and ascetic extreme metal soundscaping ritual with the release of their first full-length offering “To the Great Monolith”, issued that same year on iconic underground extreme metal imprint Iron Bonehead Productions. The formal and aesthetic path was forged and laid out from inception: lengthy, abysmal, and mostly improvised black/death metal compositions with a monstrous atmosphere, arranged for self-contained recording in a cathartic frenzy, as if devoured by an all-consuming trance. Primal instincts and free-flowing impulses dictating the entropic architecture of a lawless and all-consuming sonic dominion shrouded in darkness and chaos. A second, successive and interflowing chapter emerged two years later via Repose Records. 2020’s “To the Great Monolith II” continued the band’s quest into instinctual, deconstructed trance-driven abyss sculpting, pushing the boundaries of black/death metal deep into atmospheric absolutism. Its perpetual and immanent motor and motivator, the Great Monolith, is an expression of this almost liturgical, or religious force that posses the band’s creative process. The "flow state" felt by the self-called practitioners during these abysmal improvisation sessions, with the belief that their creations approximate this entity they call the Great Monolith. Self-perceived as a living entity with its own life, Death. Void. Terror remain gravitationally bound to the Monolith, yet this free-spirited life of its own taken up by the band can not ultimately elude the fact, that as a living entity, it grows, evolves, and morphs through its own lifecycle, which is all in becoming, and whose making and final form is not yet to be known. The second uttering of the Monolith saw the tyranny of pure improvisation crease and ripple, as subtle arrangement tactics come into the picture. An inner shift of sorts, soon to be revealed not as heresy but as necessity, as reflexion and consciousness entered the process to nurture the entity’s ever-morphing life force. This led to further sessions and rituals within this “rift” during the following five years, resulting in the birth of the "To The Great Monolith 2.5" EP " released in mid-2026 by Sentient Ruin on cassette tape as antelitteram testament to the ever-evolving symbiosis between the entity and the Monolith, with the conscious now openly self rebelling against the symbiotic notions of doctrine and orthodoxy. A dramatic sonic shift was thus underway, and a staggering metamorphosis soon revealed. Abyssal, chaos-wielding atmospheric black/death metal transmuted into psyche-devouring occult rock. Tribal black metal sprawling into infinity and embodying its ultimate annunciation: the “To The Great Monolith III; Rifts" full-length album, finally released in September 2026 again by Sentient Ruin. The first long-playing manifestation in five years, fully revealing the existential rift within the entity, as a new consciousness and free will counter balance the original free flowing primordial trance state, to shape the monstrous aura of a monolithic and shapeshifting sonic beast still all in becoming.