Since forming in 2007, Tombs have developed a sterling reputation for fusing propulsive black metal with stentorian goth rock. Led by guitarist/vocalist Mike Hill, the band has undergone numerous lineup changes over the years, and Monarchy of Shadows boasts yet another new ensemble in the form of three-quarters of the New Jersey death metal squad Kalopsia. While his supporting cast may have changed, Hill’s lyrics continue to explore the cosmic and existential. “I’ve been meditating on the idea that our concepts of logic or order are basically illusions and that the universe exists in a state of chaos and entropy,” he tells Apple Music. “Because we as humans have pattern recognition, we superimpose ideas of order on top of a very chaotic universe. That ties into the title Monarchy of Shadows in that most of the universe is dark matter—stuff that we don’t even perceive. We only understand its existence because of the way it affects the more material things in our lives and in the world.” Below, Hill takes us on a stroll through the doors of perception. Monarchy of Shadows “In the chorus of the title track, I reference the Hermetic ‘as above, so below,’ meaning that the material world is reflected by what's within the astral plane. But it’s not a true reflection—the astral plane is chaos, and then the material world is a distillation of that into something that we can understand and comprehend. But the reality is that we’re just in this sea of chaos, and that’s essentially what the song is about. Musically, the song is kind of a showcase for our skills, I guess. We’ve got some fast black-metal vibes in the beginning, and then we do this sort of goth thing, and then it ends with this Celtic Frost midtempo feel, so I think that inadvertently I wrote a song that covers all the different angles within the band.” Once Falls the Guillotine “This is one of the more raging songs on the record, with a pretty obvious death metal influence. Lyrically, the song is about getting your head chopped off. Anyone who has been a fan of the band knows that I'm a pretty morbid guy and I spend a lot of my free time contemplating death and darkness. I also read a fair amount of historical fiction, and I was taken with an account in a Robert E. Howard book about being beheaded—and the infinity of emotions you might feel in those final moments of your life when you’re waiting to get your head chopped off by an executioner and you’re about to step through the threshold into the netherworld. Maybe you question the idea of whether or not you actually have a soul, or if it just ends. Maybe you reflect on your life thinking about regrets, or maybe you’re someone who actually lived a fulfilling life and you’re happy to roll the dice and see what’s behind the door.” Necro Alchemy “This song is about dying and decomposing and having worms eat your body and eventually becoming dirt—the alchemical value of turning flesh into its baser materials. Oddly enough, this song was inspired by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan talking about how we’re all made of stardust, which basically means that everything in our universe can be broken down to the periodic table of elements, and that all life in its various forms is essentially made of these building blocks that eventually decompose into these raw materials just to be recycled into some other body, or other entity, or other thing.” Man Behind the Sun “This song is actually one of the first songs we wrote together as a band, and it ties back into the idea of there being no order in the world. It’s about the idea of transporting your consciousness light years away into the void of space, far away from any reality that you might enjoy on this planet, to some unknown place where not even logic exists, because logic is a human construct. So things like love, sympathy, compassion, logic, hate—any of these emotions that we hold as part of being human—if you go 400 light years away onto some rock somewhere, they have absolutely no meaning, because that environment is ruled by completely different laws and ideas—or no laws and no ideas. I actually got this idea from rewatching old episodes of Deadwood, where they’re talking about the town of Deadwood and how there are no laws there because the lawman hasn’t come there to set down the rules yet. So I just took that and extrapolated it into a cosmic idea of being on another planet where none of the shit we have here holds any sort of meaning.” The Dark Rift “This song was a very collaborative song for us, which is great. In a weird way, it kinda feels like an extreme metal version of ‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin—especially the ending. It has strings on it—cellos and violins that our friend Ben Karas from the band Windfaerer provided. It just has this grandiose vibe. Lyrically, the song is about how, over a long enough timeline, everything returns to zero. The inspiration for that idea came from repeated viewings of the great David Fincher movie Fight Club. There’s a line in there where it actually says, ‘Over a long period of time everyone’s lifespan turns to zero.’ So there’s this crucial nature to our lives that happens within very short periods of time, but if you take a longer timeline, there’s no meaning to anything, really. Our lives are going to be meaningless and we're just going to be recycled into some other consciousness—or some other even weirder concept that we don't know about.” Path of Totality (Midnight Sun) “We originally recorded this song in 2011 [for the album Path of Totality]. It’s been in our live set the longest out of any song we currently play. It’s been our set closer for as long as I can remember, and we’ve gone through several incarnations of the band since recording that song. Our drummer suggested we re-record it because we play it a lot differently now than it is on the album. It’s faster and there’re some subtle tempo changes that are not present on the original. And after years of playing it live, there’s this new authority that we play it with. Plus we’ve got my buddy Mike Gonçalves from Windfaerer doing some guest vocals. So this new version connects the past, present, and future of the band, because it’s still in the set list. It feels like part of the identity of the band.”