The Great Old Ones – Lands Of Azathoth (2025; Eighth Tower Records) – Avant Music News

In the Lovecraftian mythos, Azathoth is the ruler of chaos, making him a supreme and powerful Outer God. This tracks, as entropy is arguably the most powerful force in the universe because it governs every physical process and instills a relentless progression from order to disorder. Physicists believe that this principle even determines the direction of time itself.

Lands Of Azathoth is the third release from The Great Old Ones, a stage name of Eighth Tower label head Raffaele Pezzella. The album follows Yog-Sothoth from 2022 and Mythos Of Cthulhu from 2023. Not unlike its predecessors, this offering is based around hazy and immersive drones. But Lands Of Azathoth takes that approach even further as it buries melodies and percussion deep within suffocating layers of sound.

Altar of Unreality is an example, with unstructured beats that resemble ancient rituals or broken machinery beneath a mass of sounds that could represent the slow growling of an unimaginable creature. Otherworldly Illusions is 15 minutes of ponderous droning and shimmering, watery soundscapes. Azathoth Daemon Sultan is of a more rhythmic nature, but again these aspects are overwhelmed by windswept and gritty synth in the foreground.

Lands Of Azathoth taps into a fundamental cosmic truth – within all apparent structure lies decay and chaos. The album’s heavy drones, obscure rhythms, and shadowy textures invoke not only Lovecraft’s mythical deity but the universal invariant of entropy itself. Listening, one hears order dissolving slowly into noise, mirroring the unstoppable cosmic drift – a submergence in sonic atmospheres that echo the haunting inevitability of our reality’s collapse.