THY CATAFALQUE will release "XIII: Sárga erdő" — "Yellow Forest" — on November 20 via Season of Mist. It is the thirteenth album from the Hungarian avant-garde metal project of Tamás Kátai, a two-time winner of the Fonogram, Hungary's equivalent of the Grammy.
It is also the largest cast he has ever assembled: more than thirty collaborators, including a twenty-person choir and, for the first time in the project's history, a live drummer. That last detail carries more weight than it sounds, given how long THY CATAFALQUE has been built on programmed rhythm.
What the album is not is a bigger version of its predecessor. The folk and classical material that flooded 2024's "XII: A gyönyörű álmok ezután jönnek" is handled here with a lighter touch. Kátai describes the record as a walk through an old, half-remembered time approached from a quietly expansive direction — and just as a forest does not explain its colours, the album turns inward until you look up and find yourself somewhere new.
Lead single "Búcsú a piros madártól" ("A Farewell to the Red Bird") opens the album on a note of departure and resignation: a voice calling after something already gone, its sound swallowed by fog and distance. Underneath it, live drums sit against layered vocals, kamancheh and lead guitar, giving the song a heavier and more physical pull than the title suggests. Kátai wrote and produced it, as he did the rest of the album.
He shot the video himself, in woods a ten-minute walk from his family home in Makó, Hungary. The location is not incidental. Sitting beside the river Maros, it is the same stretch of ground where THY CATAFALQUE's very first video was filmed twenty-five years ago — and where another is already in the works.
The footage cuts live material from shows in Brazil, France and Hungary against hand-made and digital animation, deliberately left rough. "I wanted to keep it that way," Kátai says, "because it has a more personal touch."
"XIII: Sárga erdő" runs twelve tracks and 1:04:03, anchored by the ten-minute title track and the closing "87 tavasz, 87 ősz," which runs nearly eleven.
Tracklist:
- Búcsú a piros madártól (06:04)
- Ég-anyám, föld-apám (04:28)
- Dunnák alatt kék mező (04:04)
- Szitakötő (01:10)
- Suhamló éji fák (05:04)
- Puszta (04:58)
- Sirató (03:58)
- Cseremisz (04:05)
- Sárga erdő (10:15)
- Tömbök (04:59)
- Kút vizén nap forog (04:06)
- 87 tavasz, 87 ősz (10:52)
The album comes on CD mediabook and digital download, plus six 2x12" gatefold vinyl pressings: black, Purple/Black & White Marbled, Winter Lake (blue, crystal and black splatter), Yellow Forest (yellow, gold and black splatter), Autumn Leaves (crystal clear, filled with leaves) and Golden Sunset (red and gold sunburst).
For anyone triangulating: the reference points run from Ihsahn, DØDHEIMSGARD and SOLEFALD on one side to Hungarian folk institutions MUZSIKÁS and the SEBŐ ENSEMBLE on the other.
Pre-order / pre-save "XIII: Sárga erdő": orcd.co/thycatafalquesargaerdo