CULT OF LUNA’S MENTAL INSTITUTION PRACTICE SPACE INSPIRES THEIR NEW ALBUM

Cult of Luna are perhaps the last remaining Swedish metal band we haven’t ever written about on MetalSucks. Why, I’m not exactly sure, because they’re pretty fucking great, but thankfully they have a new album Eternal Kingdom coming out soon so there’s an excuse to talk about ’em. A press release we just received tells us about the intriguing concept behind their latest album, as told by founder and guitarist Johannes Persson:

“There’s a strange story behind the album and how we came up with the title. For the last couple of years we’ve been rehearsing in what is actually an old mental institution about 45 mins outside town – it was a mental institution in the 1920’s – and when we cleaned out our rehearsal room we found all these boxes with junk in, that seemed like they had been forgotten for a long time. Everything from medical journals to paintings by patients and things the patients had done. And we also found a journal entitled “Tales from the Eternal Kingdom”, complete with pictures and poems and words, that a patient named Holger Nilsson had written at the time. Holger Nilsson, we since found out was a guy that was sentenced for his wife’s murder and was incarcerated for life. The notebook shows that it was a really interesting world he was living in – we’re not claiming to be psychiatrists or anything like that and able to make a good diagnosis of his mental state, but it’s clear to us that he was not living in our world. So basically the whole album ETERNAL KINGDOM takes us through his disturbed world from his perspective and mind, as recounted in the journal.”

Woah. Lucky for you, the title track is now available for streaming on Cult of Luna’s MySpace page.

Eternal Kingdom drops July 8th via Earache Records (June 16th in Europe).

-VN