January 26, 2024 Soon after the Finnish Occult Heavy Metallers Church Of Void ceased to exist in 2017, drummer Johannes Lahti, aka Byron V, started planning the release of few songs he had made during the years and were buried in the drawer.
He had just joined the band Neon Angel and finished recording drums to their debut album “Neon Light District” (Sliptrick Records 2020) when he felt the time was right to get his songs to be heard. Enlightened by the realization of the few songs finally being pushed out, Johannes started composing more material in late 2019 and what started out as a studio project EP, first became two EPs and finally formed as a full-length album. A band called Byron was born.
Their debut album “The Omega Evangelion” (2020, The Goatmancer Records) represented the birth of the band with tracks from different eras, bound together by a thematical line of endings and loss in various aspects, topped with Lovecraftian imagery. It is an eclectic serving of melodic heavy metal, moving from NWOBHM to occult rock and deeper into the gloomy depths of darker metal and back to stoner and doom, offering a sensation of beautifulness in decay, a beginning in every end. An evangelion of rebirth; of Alpha in Omega.
Today, Byron returns with the brand new album “Chapter II: The Lotus Covenant” (2024, The Goatmancer Records). The Finnish heavy metal band, which mixes its eclectic sound from NWOBHM to doom metal and back again to occult rock and doom, once again moving thematically in Stephen King’s realms, based on the “Pet Sematary” novel (or – to be precise – the 2019 movie remake), the band’s sound steps deeper in black waters of melodic doom, not forgetting the rolling Byronic metal.
Overture
The Lotus Covenant
Resignation
Sword of the Apostle
Sometimes Dead Is Better
The Golden Galley
Return to Celephaïs
The X