Lustmord Lombardo have put out a second piece of music from The Pulse Of Atoms, the debut album from the pairing of Welsh dark ambient musician Lustmord and drummer Dave Lombardo.
“The Desolate Shore Part I: Submergence” follows the album’s first single and arrives ahead of the record’s release on October 2 through Ipecac Recordings.
Lombardo described the track as a piece built on instability. “‘The Desolate Shore‘ is a meditative landscape that feels like a slow descent into the abyss. There is a sense of the ground moving beneath you as shifting rhythms make it feel like nothing is ever completely still beneath the surface.”
The two-part composition sits at the centre of the record, with “The Desolate Shore Part II: Emergence” following it.
Lustmord Lombardo was announced on August 11 with “Paleomagnetic Resonance“. It arrived with a visualiser made by Displaced/Replaced.
Lustmord, the recording name of Brian Williams, set out what the duo were aiming at.
“One thing about an album like this is that you can’t really point it out as being part of any specific genre or hopefully any specific period. Is it from last year? Is it from 10 years ago, is it from 20 years ago, is it from 5 years in the future? It’s trying to create something that has its own sound, not tapping into whatever musical language or history you’re familiar with. It goes way, way further back. This is the sound of planets dying or of stars being born. It’s about a bigger picture. It’s the sound of the birth of the universe and the death of the universe; it’s not rock and roll.”
The two met backstage at a Fantômas show, introduced by Buzz Osborne, around the time Lustmord and Melvins put out their joint album Pigs Of The Roman Empire in 2004. They reconvened as a duo close to two decades later.
Rather than writing songs in a conventional way, Lustmord constructed shifting walls and vortices of sound, leaving space for Lombardo to lay in percussion and synthesizer parts. Lustmord then mixed and mastered the finished arrangements, a process the pair describe as balancing two loud musical presences against each other. The album credits Lustmord with sonics, mixing and mastering, and Lombardo with drums, percussion, synthetics and editing. Cover photography and design are by Stefan Alt.
“I’m very proud of this collaboration because it’s so different from anything else that I’ve done,” Lombardo said. “And to create this body of work with Lustmord — this guy is legendary! He rattles the plaster off of venues.”
The Pulse Of Atoms Tracklist:
- “An Eternal Presence Part I: Unknown”
- “An Eternal Presence Part II: Relentless”
- “Paleomagnetic Resonance”
- “Beyond The Vast Cold Waste”
- “The Desolate Shore Part I: Submergence”
- “The Desolate Shore Part II: Emergence”
- “The Abyssal Deep”
Pre-orders are open, with the album issued on CD, digitally and on two limited vinyl variants, clear and smoke. The smoke pressing is a double LP capped at 500 copies.
Lustmord has been working since the early 1980s and is one of the founding figures of dark ambient and industrial music, building pieces from field recordings, low-frequency drone and cinematic sound design. He has dozens of solo records and collaborations behind him and has scored for film and games, with credits on more than forty films including The Crow and Underworld.
Lombardo co-founded Slayer and drummed on the records that shaped thrash before leaving the band in 2013. He was replaced by Paul Bostaph, who remains in the lineup. He is a Grammy winner through his years in the band, and has also played with Fantômas, Suicidal Tendencies, Dead Cross, Mr. Bungle and Misfits. His first solo album, Rites Of Percussion, came out in 2023.
