WIZARD TATTOO, the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Bram the Bard, will release a new album, "When Gods Had Hands", on October 2, 2026 via Garage Fire Recordings. The Indianapolis-based project describes it as a progressive blackened doom concept record in eight movements — a deliberate hard turn away from anything the band has done before.
The concept runs a single line from antiquity to the server farm. The Watchers of the Book of Enoch fall from the sky and hand humanity the forbidden gifts — fire, metallurgy, the blade — and those gifts leave a stain. Thousands of years later, humanity picks up the same tools to build a new god out of silicon and light, chasing the reach that damned the angels before them. As the band puts it: the Fall keeps happening, we just keep changing what we call the sky.
Musically the record moves between crushing doom, blackened fury and long progressive stretches, threaded with vintage film samples and a flash of Middle Eastern texture on one movement. WIZARD TATTOO cite VENOM, WOE and early ANATHEMA as touchstones.
The album began with vocalist and writer Fausto Aurelius, who authored its concept, narrative and philosophical framework, and who runs through the record on vocals and spoken word — his voice chopped and processed into something between prophet and machine. Bram the Bard wrote and played everything else, recording, mixing, mastering and drawing the artwork by hand, continuing the project's run of near-total self-sufficiency.
"After 'Living Just For Dying', I wanted a real departure, to lean all the way into the blackened side for a whole album," Bram the Bard says. "The influences run wide, and it took a year to conceptualize and come together. It's the furthest I've pushed WIZARD TATTOO."
Aurelius adds: "This started as an attempt to make something different. Not just black metal, not just doom, not just progressive, but something else entirely. I'm proud of this contribution to the myth of WIZARD TATTOO."
Since the self-titled EP in 2022, WIZARD TATTOO have built a following in the underground on the strength of the full-length "Fables Of The Damned" (2023) and the EPs "Living Just For Dying", "One Of These Knives" and "Living Just For Knife Fighting" (all 2024), with guest vocals from Fausto Aurelius and Djinnifer. Coverage has come from Ghost Cult, The Obelisk and MetalBite.
"When Gods Had Hands" track listing:
- Part I The Fall
- Part II Damnation
- Part III Forgiveness
- Part IV Sanctuary
- Part V Retribution
- Part VI Pact With Evil
- Part VII Armageddon
- Part IIX The Fault
Pre-order "When Gods Had Hands" (digital, CD and cassette): wizardtattoo.bandcamp.com
Follow WIZARD TATTOO:
- Website: wizardtattooband.com
- Bandcamp: wizardtattoo.bandcamp.com