Oryad

February 2023 is the month to welcome phenomenal new stars on the female fronted metal horizon: ORYAD. Scorched Earth presents the band’s first video single that is out now to conquer the world of mystic metal, yet combined with prog and doom elements. Presented with an eye-capturing artful video completing the full package, it touts the upcoming new album Sacred & Profane (coming May 25, 2023).

Although the band has been working on music since 2017, the new and fresh material, written from 2020-2022, creates a more progressive doom opera style, adding modern elements to the symphonic metal foundation. Compared to their mini album Hymns of Exile & Decay, which the band released in June 2021, the sound of Oryad has elevated to a broader level, with heavy emphasis on ritual and dance at their live shows. Oryad keep their artful eye on creating a live experience for the audience that feels more like a musical emotional journey, connecting with nature and myths, rather than simply just playing songs during their eye catching live performances: „The songs are an exploration of ourselves, grief, and our connection to the universe through the vehicles of myth,“ the band describes.

Oryad band lead Moira Murphy and her operatic, powerful vocal performance constitute the force of the band. Although in the early steps of each creative process, Moira and drummer Matt Gotlin-Sheehan joined hands, the process then continued in team effort with additional musicians Luca and Adam, who are classically trained in jazz, to meet the music’s majestic and powerful demands. The album and new music benefit strongly from Moira, who is a trained opera singer, but has also taken classes in orchestral arranging specialized for metal bands in 2020 with Francesco Ferrini (pianist and orchestrator of Fleshgod Apocalypse), stepping up the arrangement game for the band.

Each song on the album speaks for the deep connection with nature and its spirits. The music holds the ability to carry its listeners through a colorful pallet of emotions, a journey which the band describes as follows: „In our society we have anesthetized so much of the human experience and partitioned off parts of ourselves, claiming that anger, for example, can only be ugly. That grief should be hidden. That it is socially acceptable to only revel in their brighter siblings love, joy, and hope…which only makes those three more cloying and homogenized.“