»Ategnatos« cover artwork revealed / European tour dates 2019 announced
We all wade through archetypes. We all ARE archetypes. Distant echoes of a life both primeval and noble. To embrace these archetypes, to accept them not only as a part of life but as life itself is what some may call enlightenment, some peace of mind. Eluveitie call it »Ategnatos«. And by using their longest gap between two Metal albums to gather momentum, they just forged their strongest album around it. »Ategnatos« will be released on April 5th 2019 via Nuclear Blast.
Today, the band revealed the stunning new album cover. This impressive artwork was created again by Travis Smith.
The band states: “‘Ategnatos’ probably became our most organic album by all accounts. It is the result of a thoroughly intuitive process, where we gave creativity full scope. And during this process quite some back-to-the-roots developments emerged in diverse aspects. Many a riff off ‘Ategnatos’ reminds on the guitar work on ‘Slania’. Following our gut feeling we brought the mixing duties back to Jens Bogren’s Fascination Street studios, where our Nuclear Blast debut was produced. And regarding the album artwork it soon became very clear to us, that we’d love to work with the fabulous Travis Smith (www.seempieces.com) again, who already created the front covers of our albums ‘Spirit’ (14 years ago!) and ‘Everything remains as it never was’.
And we’re honestly excited with the result! The frontcover shows a spectacular scenery in central Switzerland, a so-called ‘vulva cave’, as it was sought to mark sacred rites of fertility and celebrations of life in ancient times! The artwork mystically and beautifully expresses the ‘Ategnatos” very core and essence!
Once again it was a pleasure to work with Travis!”
And together with the revealing of the first album details , Swiss folk metal leaders Eluveitie also announce their European tour in support of this upcoming masterpiece.
Eluveitie will join forces with the legendary metal-act LACUNA COIL from Italy and the nu-metal-newcomcers INFECTED RAIN from Moldavia.
Eluveitie states: “Our last few months have been extremely intense, creating ‘Ategnatos’. Now we simply cannot wait to bring our new songs to the stages and to share our passion, pure fucking metal and heartfelt Celtic mysticism with you all! And all the more we’re excited to bring such great bands with us! We feel honoured to team up with our fellows of the heavyweight institution called LACUNA COIL and also with the amazing wizkid that is INFECTED RAIN, whom we’ve shared festival stages with a few times already!”
LACUNA COIL adds: “Transformation is a process and as life happens you need tons of new music! That’s why we are really excited to team up with Eluveitie and our buddies in INFECTED RAIN for this fantastic tour package. The bill is pretty diverse and interesting and we can’t wait to bring it around Europe. We will play some of our classic songs and introduce some new tunes!
We know this tour is going to be rocking, and we know the fans are going to enjoy this as much as we are!”
Lena from INFECTED RAIN comments: “2019 appears to be very promising for Infected Rain! A lot of new releases, new relationships and new places to visit. We are excited about all of this and especially about the Autumn tour that is going to end the year so perfectly. We are going to support two great bands and amazing people on tour for more than forty shows around Europe. We are honored to share the stage with Eluveitie and Lacuna Coil.”
Recordings of »Ategnatos« took place in their beloved New Sound Studio with their engineer of choice Tommy Vetterli. “Yet it was radically different as we only had four weeks to record this time around – as compared to the eight weeks we had for ‘Origins’.” By taking mixing duties to the skilled hand of renowned studio wizard Jens Bogren in his Fascination Street Studios in Örebro, Sweden, Eluveitie returned to the very spot where they mixed their now legendary »Slania« album more than ten years ago.
With »Ategnatos«, the dedicated nine-piece not only worked with a real string quartet (a premiere!) and granted Fabienne Erni’s sublime mastery of the harp the room it deserved; they also undertook a holistic upgrade resulting in some of the most catchy, most aggressive or most epic tunes the Swiss Metal nobility has ever offered.
Eluveitie are: Jonas Wolf (guitars), Matteo Sisti (whistles, bagpipes, mandola, bodhran), Nicole Ansperger (fiddle), Alain Ackermann (drums), Chrigel Glanzmann (vocals, whistles, mandola, bagpipes), Fabienne Erni (vocals, celtic harp), Kay Brem (bass), Michalina Malisz (hurdy gurdy) en Rafael Salzmann (guitars).