LUSTMORD LOMBARDO — the pairing of dark ambient pioneer Lustmord and drummer Dave Lombardo — has released "The Desolate Shore Part I: Submergence", the second single from the duo's album "The Pulse Of Atoms", due October 2 via Ipecac Recordings.
"'The Desolate Shore' is a meditative landscape that feels like a slow descent into the abyss," Lombardo said of the track. "There is a sense of the ground moving beneath you as shifting rhythms make it feel like nothing is ever completely still beneath the surface."
Lustmord, for his part, is uninterested in placing the record anywhere at all. "One thing about an album like this is that you can't really point it out as being part of any specific genre or hopefully any specific period," he said. "Is it from last year? Is it from 10 years ago, is it from 20 years ago, is it from 5 years in the future? It's trying to create something that has its own sound, not tapping into whatever musical language or history you're familiar with. It goes way, way further back. This is the sound of planets dying or of stars being born. It's about a bigger picture. It's the sound of the birth of the universe and the death of the universe; it's not rock and roll."
The two met backstage at a FANTÔMAS show, introduced by Buzz Osborne around the time Lustmord and MELVINS released their collaborative album. Nearly two decades passed before they actually worked together. The method was unusual: rather than writing songs, Lustmord built evolving walls and vortices of sound and left space inside them for Lombardo's percussion and synthesizer layers, then mixed and mastered the result himself.
"I'm very proud of this collaboration because it's so different from anything else that I've done," Lombardo said. "And to create this body of work with Lustmord — this guy is legendary! He rattles the plaster off of venues."
The album runs seven tracks: "An Eternal Presence Part I: Unknown", "An Eternal Presence Part II: Relentless", "Paleomagnetic Resonance", "Beyond The Vast Cold Waste", "The Desolate Shore Part I: Submergence", "The Desolate Shore Part II: Emergence" and "The Abyssal Deep". Pre-orders are open, including two limited vinyl variants in clear and smoke.
Lombardo's résumé needs little introduction — a founding member of SLAYER, and a fixture in FANTÔMAS, SUICIDAL TENDENCIES, DEAD CROSS, MR. BUNGLE and MISFITS. His 2023 solo debut "Rites Of Percussion" already pointed in this direction; "The Pulse Of Atoms" takes it much further out.