Dear Desolation is the fourth studio album by Australian deathcore band Thy Art Is Murder. The album was released on 18 August 2017 by Nuclear Blast.[3] The record is the band's last album with founding drummer Lee Stanton, as well as the first to feature Kevin Butler on bass.[4]
Background
Following the release of their third full-length album Holy War in 2015, vocalist CJ McMahon briefly left the band. In January 2017, the band announced McMahon's return and released the stand-alone single "No Absolution" (a B-side from the Holy War recording sessions) as part of the announcement.[5]
According to Eliran Kantor, the artist behind the album's cover, the image of the wolf feeding a baby lamb serves to convey the album's primary themes of greed, oppression, cynicism, preying on and misleading the weak, and the connection of fear & hope; the wolf feeding the baby lamb outwardly portrays kindness, while in reality, the wolf is helping the lamb to grow in order to prepare a bigger meal for herself.[6]
The album received generally positive reviews from music critics. Exclaim! called it "the band's strongest album to date",[7] noting the band's stylistic shift from deathcore towards conventional death metal inspired by bands like Behemoth and Cannibal Corpse.[7] It has been described as continuing their prior deathcore sound by Metal Hammer.[8]Metal Hammer praised McMahon's vocal performance, and wrote that though the album is "short on the penetrative hooks that Holy War possessed in abundance, Into Chaos We Climb and The Final Curtain's seismic jolts and haunting leads leave an indelible mark for deathcore disciples to latch onto."[8]
