HMLTD

Between the oldest and newest songs on this album, there is an age gap of about two and a half years. A few of the songs were written at a time when a HMLTD album was just a distant thought on a blurry horizon, while certain songs were written to tie it all together. Somewhere in the middle of this period, reflecting on our output up until that point, I got the first real idea of exactly what our album would be about. I think that is the moment West of Eden, as a collection, was conceived. What followed was a process of revisiting material and figuring out what fitted into this narrative, and then writing more to expand on and build it all into a singular thing. Dozens of songs were thrown to the wayside. What remains, whilst sonically eclectic, remains because it fits into what we feel is a unified, conceptual whole: West of Eden. First of all, about the title West of Eden. In Genesis, Cain murders his brother Abel out of envy, as he was the Lord’s favourite. In vengeful Old Testament fashion, the Lord then places a mark on Cain that would prevent anyone from killing him, whilst banishing him in Nod, just East of Eden (the promised land). John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel ‘East of Eden’ channels biblical references to juxtapose both Eden and Cain’s banishment in Nod with the American frontier; a promised land, that is simultaneously marked & cursed. ‘West of Eden’ is a play on and homage to both of these worlds. The cursed place is no longer the East of Eden, but the West. A superpower masked by the façade of luxury and equality, in reality is a dying corpse stained by its own sins against humanity. And like every great empire before it, the West will also eventually consume itself, and in its dying breath clearly position itself not as Eden, but a stones throw away from it; enough for it to be no longer the promised land, but its direct opposite. The possibility of redemption, the proverbial Eden, is to the east and just slightly out of reach. Whether Cain can return to Eden, whether the West can save itself, is a speculative question; whether it ought to is a moral one. The social, cultural and political backdrop that provides the setting for this album is a bleak one, the West is dying in complacent affluence. Sex is commodified. Faith is dead. Morality is used as a tool, and moulded to fit whatever function is required of it by those who yield it. Western civilization has entered its decadent stage. The era of The Last Man (Letzter Mensch) has come. And all the while, the earth grows sick. Ecological catastrophe is guaranteed. The West is Dead opens the album and aims to set this scene. Its opening line, ‘Three years ago I said The West is dying right underneath my nose’ is a direct nod to our first release Stained and its manifesto; a polemic on the hypocrisy of Western moral dogmas, as personified through the bloodlust lunacy of US foreign policy. Things have only gotten worse since then. The West is dead. Sick dolphins lap at the tide of shipping tankers, their fins falling off and reddening the wake. The insects have all dropped from the skies, and now clog our swimming pools. The global economy enters free fall; CEOs hang themselves by their neckties.