ASSUMPTION have put their third album out to hear in full before it lands on Friday, and Paradox Of The Arrow is a record built on weight, space and time bending under its own heaviness.

Italian death doom outfit ASSUMPTION will release their overwhelming third album, Paradox Of The Arrow, this Friday on 20 Buck Spin, who today unveils the record, now streaming in its entirety.

With the guitars and bass for Paradox Of The Arrow tracked by the band in Italy and Slovenia, the material was reamped alongside the recording of the drums, vocals, and synth as well as mixing and mastering engineered and handled by Claudio Mulas. The cover art was painted by Mariya Popyk (Lugubrious Garment, Tomarum) and photographed by Marco Zanin, and the layout was handled by Claudio Collina, including photography by Cristina Oddo.

Fans of Disembowelment, Spectral Voice, Mortiferum, Mournful Congregation, Evoken, and Indesinence will not want to miss ASSUMPTION’s Paradox Of The Arrow.

Vocalist/guitarist Giorgio Trombino writes, “The fruit of endless hours of passion, travels, obstacles, and visions has come to light. This album is a representation of our moment in time. It has opened several doors in our mind. We’ll never cease to mutate because this is the destiny we’ve chosen as a band.

“We acknowledge all those who worked hard to make this happen. Follow the arrows.”

20 Buck Spin will release Paradox Of The Arrow on LP, CD, and digital formats this Friday the 13th of November. Preorders can be placed at the label webshop and Bandcamp.

Paradox Of The Arrow is a new descent into the strange temporal architecture of ASSUMPTION’s death doom. Since their earliest recordings, the band has treated the genre less as a monolith set in stone than a space in which mass, duration and atmosphere can be manipulated. On Paradox Of The Arrow, that process advances further, stretching the apparent distance between one moment and the next until time itself dissipates into an altered abstraction.

ASSUMPTION’s immense low-end foundations remain, but the band’s heaviness is rarely a matter of density alone. Riffs unfurl geologically, like the convergent boundary to a subduction zone, before abruptly accelerating into passages of violent death metal, only to collapse again into long intervals of suspension, dissonant guitar resonance and spectral ambience. Guttural vocals emerge from deep within while drums alternately measure out enormous spaces and rupture them without warning. Melody appears in oblique fragments rather than conventional resolution, and psychedelic details flicker at the margins, where quiet stillness can feel as consequential as impact and the vibrations of beauty and dread dissolve into an amorphous shimmering light.

Taking its name from Zeno’s ancient paradox of motion – the proposition that an arrow in flight, observed at any single instant, is motionless – Paradox Of The Arrow finds an apt philosophical analogue for ASSUMPTION’s music. These six tracks from the depths draw the listener through successive states of movement and inertia, collapsing the notion of linear time. Across its prolonged passages and sudden eruptions, the album continually distorts the sense of scale and duration. By the time the arrow reaches its mark, the path behind it feels far less certain than when it began.

“Monstrous gutturals rise up from cavernous depths, and the music seems to miserably wail and feverishly convulse. The drumming is tremendous, and so is the band’s ability to create coherent melodic through-lines in a constantly changing experience.” – No Clean Singing

“Few bands have recreated the sound of death-doom pioneers Disembowelment as accurately as Italy’s ASSUMPTION. Paradox Of The Arrow throws out some seriously heavy, rumbling guitar riffs and massive drumming. The growls emanate from the deepest abyss. The album is not as dense as you might think, however. There’s a light psychedelic feel in spots, building enormous spaces before bursting them entirely.” – Invisible Oranges

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