Born during the dark days of the pandemic, Dreamless Veil is an extreme metal band comprised of Artificial Brain guitarist Dan Gargiulo, Inter Arma / Artificial Brain vocalist Mike Paparo and Psycroptic drummer Dave Haley.

Gargiulo and Paparo were roommates in Richmond, VA, in early 2020. Stuck indoors at a time of bleak uncertainty, they retreated into their own world. “For a lot of the pandemic, it was just Dan and I listening to records over and over again, seeing how many times we could listen to Lugubrum in one night,” Paparo says. “So, the vibe was dismal. It was the middle of the pandemic, and we were like, ‘What are we doing?’”

Accustomed to touring regularly, the enforced isolation hit them particularly hard. “Dan was going through a rough time, and he was just writing all this stuff,” Paparo explains. “It was originally going to be a solo project, but he can’t play drums and he hates writing lyrics. He asked me to write lyrics, and then he asked me to do the vocals. He knew Dave Haley because Dan’s old band, Revocation, toured with Psycroptic many times. They had talked about doing a project together back then.”

Dreamless Veil’s debut, Every Limb of the Flood, is a blackened concept album that follows the travails of Grief, a character who awakens from extended debauchery and begins the slow and torturous process of trying to disappear completely. “When we were doing this record, I didn’t even want to exist in the world,” Paparo says. “I was going through some things, so the record is a bit autobiographical in that sense.”

The vocalist says he’s always wanted to do a concept record, but the right opportunity never presented itself until Gargiulo delivered eight Dreamless Veil tracks in one go. “It wasn’t like I was listening to them as they were being written,” he explains. “Dan had all the songs finished, with a drum machine, so it was up to me to tie them all together. But he knew which song was going to be the title track already, and he knew the track sequence. He was just looking for something to fill it in.”

Paparo says he was wary of writing a concept record at first—even though he’d always wanted to do one. “You don’t wanna force something,” he says. “Then it turns into this pretentious pile of garbage. I mean, you know how concept records are. But this felt right. The vibe was there.”

After the pounding dissonance of opener “Dim Golden Rave,” the black metal maelstrom “A Generation of Eyes” serves as the “coming-to” after a period of depravity and dissipation. “It’s a questioning of everything,” Paparo explains. “I kind of based it on the Neil Young line, ‘Rust never sleeps.’ He’s saying decay is eternal. The decay of your mind, body and spirit doesn’t stop. After this time of debauchery, the character comes to, asking, ‘Where the hell am I? What have I done?’” The song leads into the alternately hellish and mournful “Saturnism,” the title of which is an archaic term for lead poisoning. “This character, Grief, is cataloguing all of these decisions and feelings and comes to the conclusion that he’s poison for himself, he’s poison for everyone around him,” Paparo offers. “There’s a line in there that says, ‘I am poison, unworthy of life.’ Very uplifting.”

Later in the story, “Cyanide Mine” is black metal as mental static. “It’s about being in stasis, like some kind of fugue state,” Paparo explains. “You’re stuck. There’s no hope. The past is behind you and there’s no hope for the future. Death and decay are closing in, and you don’t know what to do.”

The album title comes from the song of the same name, in which Grief is contemplating suicide. “When I was a kid, I saw satellite photos of the Mississippi River overflowing,” Paparo says. “All the tributaries made it look like the Mississippi had these weird limbs. So, I had this image in my head of someone committing suicide, and the blood coming out of them was the limbs.”

What happens to Grief in the end? No spoilers here. But Every Limb of the Flood is well worth the time it takes to find out. A cavalcade of black metal, doom, and death metal, the album takes many twists and turns—musically and emotionally—as Grief’s story moves toward its conclusion.

Every Limb of the Flood was mixed by Dan Gargiulo and mastered by Colin Marston. The guitars and bass were recorded by Brett Bamberger at the Shed Limited. The vocals were recorded by Dan Gargiulo at his home studio. The drums were recorded by Joe Haley at Triple A Studios in Australia.