Corelia’s New Album is OUT NOW!! Listen!
Corelia’s five-years-in-the-making new album, New Wilderness, is FINALLY here.
Sure, five years doesn’t seem like THAT long compared to some bands, but the release follows an incredibly bizarre and convoluted series of events that had the band’s fans — who had already forked over money for the album — steaming mad as Corelia completely disappeared for years at a time.
To review: in January of 2015, this promising up-and-coming prog metal band launched an Indiegogo campaign to crowdfund their eagerly-anticipated full-length debut, which they promised would be a ninety-minute, double-disc release that was allegedly already completely written. Fans ultimately donated upwards of $33,000 to group’s campaign — more than twice their original goal of $15,000.
MetalSucks checked in with the band in October of 2016, nearly two years after the crowdfunding campaign, and they subsequently released a statement saying “The accusation that we’re scamming anyone in general is just not true.” That would be the last public word we heard from the band until…
… last month, when unaffiliated Los Angeles-area producer Tim Ossenfort, posing as a disgruntled former band member under the similarly-named Facebook page “Corelias,” threatened to release the finished album to the world. His troll page attracted quite a bit of attention from the metal community, including from Corelia themselves, who at first issued a vague, brief update, then a much longer, more detailed one. In the latter, they explained that mental illness was to blame for the delays, with an incommunicado member making the album’s completion difficult. They also apologized to fans multiple times, pledged to release the album in as finished a form as possible given those issues, and to refund any portion of the crowdfunded money that hadn’t been spent. Ossenfort later offered the band his services his free to help finish up the album.
Which brings us up to today. It’s not clear whether the band took up Ossenfort on his offer, but one way or another it’s finally here: Corelia have released their album for the entire world to hear. It’s called New Wilderness, consists of 16 tracks, and is every bit the epic the band promised (at least as far as we can glean from the first few tracks we’ve listened to as we’re writing this post).
True to the band’s statement, these are clearly unfinished versions; not only is the album marked “demo,” but it doesn’t sound finished, the mix a bit uneven and with many of the individual instrument tracks in raw form and without the requisite processing that comes with a final mix and master.
Still, it’s finally here! As finished as it’s ever gonna be. We never thought we’d see the day.
The band has not so much as issued a statement on the album’s release — it just showed up on Soundcloud late last night. To that end, we’re not even sure if this release has been authorized by the band, although the Soundcloud profile it’s posted on is marked “Coreliaofficial” and has some of the band’s older material that’s clearly been there for a while. Further, needless to say, they also haven’t indicated when and how they’ll make good on their promise to refund crowdfunding backers any unused portions of those funds.
Still… once again, here it is. Embedded below. Go nuts, folks!
