AMAROK will release Overcome, a double album of remixed and reimagined material featuring members of VASTUM, PRIMITIVE MAN, MIZMOR and GRIDFAILURE, on September 25 through Canada's Hypaethral Records. The first taste — "Penance," rebuilt from the ground up by Leila Abdul-Rauf — is streaming now.
The Northern California outfit welds the sustained drones and crushing weight of funeral doom to the layered guitar harmonies and blistering intensity of black metal. The name comes from the giant wolf of Inuit mythology, a creature said to be capable of tearing a person's soul from their body.
AMAROK's self-titled debut landed in 2011, followed by a run of splits with friends across the extreme underground and the ambitious 2xLP Devoured in 2018. Every composition in their catalogue carries a continuous Roman numeral, marking each piece as a chapter in one ongoing story of transcendence.
The 2024 double album Resilience is the band's fullest statement so far — a meditation on climate catastrophe, existential dread, grief and endurance that turns crushing heaviness into something closer to hope. Decibel called it a "massive, slow-burn offering"; BrooklynVegan singled out its "slow-paced, heavy/beautiful post-metal."
Overcome returns to that record as a companion 2xCD, handing ten interpretations of Resilience to artists from across the experimental and extreme spectrum: Ethan Lee McCarthy of PRIMITIVE MAN, Leila Abdul-Rauf of VASTUM, Andrew Black of MIZMOR and HELL, and others. The remixes reframe the album's emotional core through radically different lenses without abandoning its themes of transformation and survival.
Abdul-Rauf's "Penance" is the clearest example of how far the reworkings go. "When AMAROK first contacted me to remix the mammoth 'Penance,' I asked them if they would be fine with me re-envisioning the song as a whole, to which they replied, 'do anything you want with it,'" she recalls. "What first drew me in were the lyrics, expressing the pain of having grown up with organized religion forced upon you, which I immediately connected with personally. The gorgeously harmonic guitar melodies I knew I had to do justice to in some way. I thought I could best do that with turning them into vocal melodies, which lent themselves well to the Eastern European folk edge I brought to them, overlaid with minimal synth drones so that the impactful lyrics were front and center."
Overcome comes as a 2xCD limited to 200 copies and digitally. A CD edition of Resilience, also limited to 200, is available alongside it.
"Overcome" track listing:
Disc 1 01. Charred — remixed by SINUOUS VOID 02. Ascension — remixed by ONLY NOW 03. Interlude — remixed by COLLAPSE 04. Penance — remixed by GRIDFAILURE 05. Legacy — remixed by Ethan Lee McCarthy
Disc 2 01. Charred — remixed by DJ Eons One 02. Ascension — remixed by MIRRORIDDIAN 03. Interlude (Kali Yuga) — remixed by AUTO SEER 04. Penance — reimagined by Leila Abdul-Rauf 05. Legacy — remixed by Andrew Black
AMAROK is: Brandon Squyres — bass/vocals Kenny Ruggles-Alaniz — guitar/vocals Nathan Collins — guitar Colby Byrn — drums
Stream and preorder "Overcome": hypaethralrecords.bandcamp.com · Physical: Hypaethral webshop