Mono Requiem For Hell

MONO are a band driven by intangible conflicts. Their albums have found inspiration in the inescapable coexistence

of love and loss, faith and hopelessness, light and darkness. Fittingly, their new album, Requiem For Hell, incorporates all of those conflicts into the one universal inevitability in life: Birth, and death.

Requiem For Hell finds MONO returning to longtime friend and collaborator, Steve Albini. After MONO and Albini's band, Shellac, toured Japan together last year, they realized how much they missed the (often wordless) creative dialogue they shared during the making of many of their most memorable albums – beginning with Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky... (2004) and culminating with Hymn To Immortal Wind (2009). The rebirth of the Albini collaboration for Requiem For Hell also coincided with the birth of a close friend's first child, whose actual in utero heartbeat serves as the foundation for the aptly named "Ely's Heartbeat." For MONO, it all felt so right, so inevitable.

Requiem For Hell is undeniably heavier and scarier than most of MONO's output to this point – hear the dizzying 18- minute title track for example – but it also carries some of their most sublime moments. This dichotomy is how one band’s obsession with conflict has manifested itself into one of underground music's simultaneously quietest and loudest catalogs.

MONO’ s 9th album “Requiem For Hell” to be released on October 14th!

This album was produced, recorded and mixed by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago, and mastered by Bob Weston. Steve Albini, the producer and one of the main participants of this album, was already a producer for 3 of MONO’s albums in the past, and just last year, his band Shellac played their first Japan tour in 23 years as a co-headliner tour with MONO. After the recordings, MONO and Shellac shared the stage again in North America.

“Requiem For Hell” features 5 songs. Unlike the last double album “The Last Dawn / Rays Of Darkness”, which re-visited the band’s early sound, MONO introduces strings once again, showing broader dynamics and a wider range of sounds.

From TAKAAKIRA ‘TAKA’ GOTO / MONO:

“This album is a series of songs from a flood of inspirations in 2015. After writing song after song and giving them titles, we stumbled upon Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and the story struck a chord with us. “Divine Comedy” is a story about travelling down to Hell, through to purgatory… this is when we decided to use Gustave Dóre’s illustration from “Divine Comedy”’s last scene as the main cover.”

“Requiem For Hell” comes as a 2xLP in a special slipcase cover with a die cut hole on the back side, printed inner sleeves and an engraving on side D, showing a foetus.

Comments Taka Goto:

“Our long-time friend Jeremy (the owner of our American label Temporary Residence) had his first-born, she was named Ely. Jeremy had been sending us photos and her heartbeats from long before she was born. When Ely was born, we decided to dedicate one of our songs to her, with hopes of her listening to it when she is grown up, and decided to use her heartbeats as an intro on the song “Ely’s Heartbeat”.

01. Death In Rebirth
02. Stellar
03. Requiem For Hell
04. Ely's Heartbeat
05. The Last Scene