PALLBEARER have released a second song from their highly-anticipated new album, Mind Burns Alive (May 17, Nuclear Blast Records), with today’s arrival of the deeply moving 'Endless Place,' complemented by a visually striking black-and-white companion video.
'Endless Place,' which features the band’s first ever musical collaboration (a saxophone solo from Norman Williamson of Amasa Hines), encapsulates the thematic essence of the album, as described by Brett Campbell: “These are vignettes which tell the stories of people who deal with myriad sicknesses of the spirit. These are illnesses communicated by the world we live in, and the subjects are the symptoms of its disease.” The dreamlike scenario that enfolds in 'Endless Place,' both lyrically and musically, is one focused on a sense of being lost, disjointed, trapped by unease and confusion.
Five years in the making, with recording initially slated for 2020, and thwarted yet again in 2022, it was 2023 that saw the band members living locally to one another in Little Rock for the first time in nine years. As a group, they self-produced the album in their own, newly constructed studio (Idlewild Audio) and at Fellowship Hall Sound. Reflecting on this, bassist/vocalist Joseph D. Rowland remarked, “It’s ironic given that the album is largely centered around isolation, but it felt like it summoned us into being back together again in one town, after so long apart.”