Job for a Cowboy have unveiled the new song “Beyond the Chemical Doorway” — the third single and opening track from the band’s forthcoming album Moon Healer, out February 23rd.
The revived deathcore act returned last year with its first material in nearly a decade, setting the bar high with comeback single “The Agony Seeping Storm” and its follow-up, “The Forever Rot.”
Impressively, that level of consistency carries over to “Beyond the Chemical Doorway.” Opening with ominous guitar runs that evoke early Mastodon, the song journeys through prog-metal passages (think Cynic but more brutal) in which frontman Jonny Davy unfurls the breadth of his vocal range and inflections, from gutturals to more nasally screamo howls.
Strategically composed and quantitatively dense in lyrical content, the track’s four-minute duration feels strangely longer. Perhaps that’s because the lyrics function as a full-on exploration of Gnosticism, as explained by Davy, which ties into Moon Healer‘s larger concept.
“On Moon Healer, we unravel the dismal narrative of a close friend consumed by an unwavering pursuit of enlightenment,” Davy said of the album via a press release. “They achieve this through a compulsive embrace of hallucinogenic drugs. This storyline emerges from the foundation set in our earlier album, Sun Eater, delving deeper into the intricacies brewing within our friend’s psyche.”
Continued Davy: “When under the influence of these drugs, this individual claimed to encounter entities and find themselves in indescribable worlds that defy rational comprehension. Many who undergo such experiences draw intriguing parallels between diverse facets of Gnostic philosophy, biblical depictions of angels, and the stages of Bardo Thodol delineated in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the album’s opener, ‘Beyond the Chemical Doorway,’ our friend vividly voices his hallucinations, recounting the experience of breaching forbidden, gnostic-like realms, with each account culminating in the utter unraveling of his being.”
Pre-order Moon Healer on vinyl here, and watch the video for “Beyond the Chemical Doorway” below.