Sometimes the most interesting musical encounters happen between worlds that, at first sight, seem to have very little in common.
Why My Lord is one of those encounters.
The song is a collaboration with my friend and an exceptionally talented classical composer, After Rain. He began with an emotionally charged classical composition, and I entered the picture with what I know best: extreme metal. The result is a piece that brings together two very different musical languages in order to express something they both understand surprisingly well — pain, sorrow, longing and despair.
The song was written around the feeling of believing in something that never looks back. There is a particular kind of suffering in that experience. It is not simply the pain of losing something that once existed. Sometimes the most devastating loss is the realization that what you believed might happen was never going to happen at all. You keep moving towards something that remains just beyond reach, hoping that eventually it will turn towards you. But it never does.
The composer described my contribution to the song as an attempt to give “body and soul” to the pain, sorrow and despair of believing in something that never looks back — not even in your final moments. I think that is a surprisingly accurate description of what happens when the restrained emotional language of classical music meets the physical force of extreme metal.
For me, the interesting part of this collaboration was never simply the contrast between the two styles. I have always been fascinated by what happens when seemingly incompatible musical languages are placed in the same dramatic context. Classical music can carry enormous emotional weight without needing distortion or aggression, while extreme metal can turn psychological states into something almost physical. Put them together, and the contrast itself becomes part of the storytelling. Why My Lord therefore feels less like a meeting between two genres and more like a meeting between two ways of expressing the same wound.
The visual side of the release also comes from a long-standing creative collaboration. The cover photograph was created by my friend Dávid Ujhelyi, who has photographed several Darkwave album covers, including Evanescent Horizons. His work has become an important part of the visual world surrounding my music, so I was particularly happy that he created the image for this song as well.
Why My Lord is ultimately a small experiment in what can happen when classical music and extreme metal stop treating each other as opposites.
Sometimes sorrow needs an orchestra.
Sometimes it needs a wall of distorted guitars.
And sometimes it needs both.
Listen to Why My Lord on Bandcamp.