COHEED AND CAMBRIA // Enter An Unheavenly Realm With New Album + Single

Jul 03, 2018 / WORDS Matt Doria, Contributing Editor / PHOTOS Jimmy Fontaine / The Armory Wars rage on!

After switching things up and dropping their first non-conceptual LP in 2015’s The Colour Before The Sun, New York prog-rock heroes Coheed And Cambria have once more conjured up a sprawling, stately epic for their forthcoming ninth album.

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Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures will hit shelves on October 5th via Roadrunner, and comes as the first chapter in a new arc of Coheed And Cambria’s long-running Armory Wars anthology.

Spanning an ambitious 75 minutes over 15 tracks, Vaxis also brings the quintet back to doing what they do best: getting way too into their own jams and delivering tracks that drag listeners deep into a universe unlike any other a band could summon.

Pre-orders are avaliable for a stunning range of bundles, including the ‘Limited Edition Deluxe Box Set’ which includes an exclusive 80+ page hardcover illustrated novel inked by Chase Stone, as well as the complete Act 1 novella written by Coheed frontman Claudio Sanchez and his wife, Chondra Echert.

The set also includes a fully-wearable hard-plastic mask of the main character in The Unheavenly Creatures, a CD copy of the album, a three-panel fold out poster of expanded album cover art, as well as the exclusive bonus disc, The Crown Heights Demos, which presents the songs in their original written form.

Alongside the album’s announcement came the release of a shiny new single, Unheavenly Creatures. The impossibly dynamic cut (which runs a perfect four minutes and 20 seconds long) is peak Coheed: glittering guitars, intricate synths and vocals that simultaneously sear the eardrum and sooth it with a leather jacket coolness.

The track is accompanied by a music video directed by rock video prodigy P.R. Brown. As a press release describes, “The clip takes us inside the story’s opening chapters, where we begin by seeing two captured criminals (Creature and Colossus) being walked through a ship on their way towards judgment for their crimes. It’s clear any friendship that once existed has not survived, as we see colorful ﬂashbacks of their crimes committed against society, and perhaps, one another.”