CARNIFEX have announced "More Than Misery", their first full-length album for Sumerian Records, for release on November 6. The title track and its official video arrived with the announcement.
The record turns on a shift in vantage point. Survival has always been the live wire running through vocalist Scott Ian Lewis's lyrics, but on earlier CARNIFEX albums he wrote while still locked inside the experiences he was trying to endure. "More Than Misery" is the first time he has written after the act of surviving, looking back at it rather than up from underneath it.
That change gives the title its deliberate double meaning. Read one way, "more than misery" promises something even worse waiting past the darkness. Read the other, it becomes an assertion that a life is larger than the misery inside it. The title track walks the first reading before arriving at the second, descending through burning obsession, isolation and self-loathing, caught in a cycle of suffering that feels unbreakable — until the grip loosens, the face fades and the mask tears away.
"'More Than Misery' is about what happens when suffering becomes more than something you endure, it becomes what changes you," Lewis says. "This is CARNIFEX at our most honest and unapologetically brutal."
Musically the band set out to fuse their 2005 instincts with the tools available in 2026: the physical directness of first-wave deathcore, their death metal foundations, and the symphonic atmosphere developed across the later records — with guitars kept as the primary voice and orchestration used to deepen rather than replace them. Every song was built with the live room in mind, down to whether five musicians could carry each part convincingly onstage.
"More Than Misery" was tracked in Tennessee with Zach Householder of WHITECHAPEL and mixed by Jeff Dunne, an entirely new production team for the band. It follows "Roses & Rotting Corpses", which opened the Sumerian campaign back in May.
The full track listing:
- ...And I Held Hands With Death
- More Than Misery
- The Process Of Pain (feat. Chaney Crabb)
- No Gods Only Graves
- Coffin Crowned King
- Roses & Rotting Corpses
- Only The Dead
- Gothic Serpent
- Heart Made Of Teeth
- Licking Love From A Knife
CARNIFEX will spend the months around the release on the road, first joining ALL SHALL PERISH for "The Price Of Existence" 20th-anniversary tour, then headline dates, an appearance at Furnace Fest and a 20-date European co-headline run with DESPISED ICON and SUFFOCATION. That European leg crosses release day itself, with the band playing Sheffield, U.K. on November 6.
Formed in Fallbrook, California in 2005 by Lewis and drummer Shawn Cameron, CARNIFEX came out of the collision of death metal, black metal, metalcore and Southern California's all-ages hardcore scene, and helped write the language of deathcore's first wave.
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