Defying convention and expectations once again, Pharaoh Overlord’s upcoming album 7 is to be released via Rocket Recordings on 20th November. They have just shared a video for ‘The Man Laid Low,’ a continuation of the story which began in ‘Arms of None’.
“We wanted to continue with the idea where somebody else is playing the fictional Pharaoh Overlord character. In the ‘Arms of None’ video it was a band called Modem, and in this video the character is played by Julius Jääskeläinen, anarchitect and the other half of the Jääskeläinen guitar twins of Circle,” says Tomi.
The video pays homage to the likes of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ by Massive Attack or ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by The Verve. Speaking on the concept, Tomi adds, “Walking in an environment like a city centre brings in an element of chance that cannot be controlled. Lots of things are happening at the same time, yet nothing is scripted and everything falls perfectly in place. It’s also a little time capsule of what the environment and the people looked like in that exact day it was filmed.”
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Pharaoh Overlord album release shows:
20.11. Stockholm / BATA
21.11. Malmö / Brogatan
22.11. Copenhagen / RUST
Pharaoh Overlord’s 7 rides in auspicious, possessed of the gleaming high octane euphoria that transforms a dreary everyday into a triumph-over-adversity movie montage, swaggering in with high-saturation synth-rock, dressed in a custom satin bomber jacket for euphoric big-screen moments that never existed, salvation narrated by the death growl of Aaron Turner and guest falsetto from Richard Dawson.
The number 7 is a cross-cultural signifier of good luck and divine completion, and if this promises much, 7 delivers, as Jussi Lehtisalo and Tomi Leppänen’s self-proclaimed "dream album". "This is, finally, the real Pharaoh Overlord," promises Jussi, “I can generate demos easily, but working with a producer, it’s reached a destination we really wanted.”
Now, over 20 albums deep, Lehtisalo proclaims Pharaoh Overlord ready to breakthrough, having brought in big guns on the buttons for the first time, with notable Finnish experimental black metal band Oranssi Pazuzu‘s Juho Vanhanen on production, and Niko Lehdontie mixing. Together they have polished the chrome of this synth-driven death-metal hyper-rock into a high-gloss mirror-shine, to "something like Justice’s debut album with the raw and disturbing atmospheres of Scott Walker’s Drift-era sound", says Vanhanen.
Pharaoh Overlord are consistent in one field: nailing the joyful thrill of being utterly unpredictable. Reliably unreliable when it comes to sticking to a genre, they are magpie-like music heads without a care for the stultifying brand-building best practice of dullard music industry proscriptions, describing their process as "like playing the Oblique Strategies but without the cards". This tracks with the anti-strategies of their parent band Circle, who once loaned out their name to another band for a year, corrupting their own legacy. Beginning as a full group, they now have two permanent members, but in their time have rendered glossy synthwave, whitewater motorik, idiosyncratic overdriven art rock, bombed-out psychedelia and more, always dancing fleet-footed across genre, as parent band Circle do, too. "They simply go wherever the music needs to go," says Dawson, who is both collaborator and superfan. "If the surface-sound of the albums change from record to record the spirit remains the same."
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Photo credit: Mika Taanila
