Italian doom/death metal band Assumption unveils gripping title track to their third LP; »Paradox Of The Arrow« out November 13th on 20 Buck Spin!
Italian doom/death metal band Assumption premiere the second single and title track of their upcoming full-length album, »Paradox Of The Arrow«, set to release on November 13th, 2026 via 20 Buck Spin.
Tracklist:
01. Paradox Of The Arrow
02. A Labyrinth In Ruin
03. Tombs Upon The Sun
04. Southwards Our Spirits Shall Forever Drift
05. Selenite
06. Vrykolakes
Courtesy of Earsplit PR:
Italian death doom outfit Assumption unveils the title track to their engulfing third album, »Paradox Of The Arrow«, nearing release on their new home at 20 Buck Spin.
Assumption returns with »Paradox Of The Arrow«, a new descent into the strange temporal architecture of death doom. Since their earliest recordings the band have treated the genre less as a monolith set in stone than a space in which mass, duration and atmosphere can be manipulated. On »Paradox Of The Arrow«, that process advances further, stretching the apparent distance between one moment and the next time itself dissipates into an altered abstraction.
Assumption’s immense low-end foundations remain, but the band’s heaviness is rarely a matter of density alone. Riffs unfurl geologically, like the convergent boundary to a subduction zone, before abruptly accelerating into passages of violent death metal, only to collapse again into long intervals of suspension, dissonant guitar resonance and spectral ambience. Guttural vocals emerge from deep within while drums alternately measure out enormous spaces and rupture them without warning. Melody appears in oblique fragments rather than conventional resolution, and psychedelic details flicker at the margins, where quiet stillness can feel as consequential as impact and the vibrations of beauty and dread dissolve into an amorphous shimmering light.
Photo credit: Cristina Oddo
Taking its name from Zeno’s ancient paradox of motion; the proposition that an arrow in flight, observed at any single instant, is motionless; »Paradox Of The Arrow« finds an apt philosophical analogue for Assumption’s music. These 6 tracks from the depths draw the listener through successive states of movement and inertia, collapsing the notion of linear time. Across its prolonged passages and sudden eruptions, the album continually distorts the sense of scale and duration. By the time the arrow reaches its mark, the path behind it feels far less certain than when it began.
Fans of Disembowelment, Spectral Voice, Mortiferum, Mournful Congregation, Evoken, and Indesinence will not want to miss Assumption’s »Paradox Of The Arrow«. The album’s guitars and bass were tracked by the band in Italy and Slovenia. That material was reamped alongside the recording of the drums, vocals, and synth as well as mixing and mastering engineered and handled by Claudio Mulas. The cover art was painted by Mariya Popyk (Lugubrious Garment, Tomarum) and photographed by Marco Zanin, and the design/layout handled by Claudio Collina, including photography by Cristina Oddo.
Vocalist/guitarist Giorgio Trombino reveals, “This song was written at a time in this band’s life in which we felt like we were trapped in a limbo due to a whole array of annoying setbacks.
A string of issues had plagued the production and release of our second album, »Hadean Tides«, and the future of Assumption was even put to question at some point. Discovering Zeno’s paradox of the arrow allowed us to finally give our turmoil a lyrical voice.
Zeno defied the concept of motion by proposing an idea of time as a sequence of still frames. This image seemed perfect to depict the situation we found ourselves stuck into. To represent this metaphoric stillness, we decided to use the seemingly motionless clean guitar notes you can hear in the song’s intro. Those are, in a way, the moving-yet-immobile arrows portrayed by Mariya Popyk on the album’s cover painting.”
Assumption’s engulfing »Paradox Of The Arrow« is now streaming on YouTube HERE and Bandcamp HERE.
20 Buck Spin will release »Paradox Of The Arrow« on LP, CD, and digital formats on November 13th. Preorders can now be placed at the label webshop HERE and Bandcamp where »Tombs Upon The Sun« is streaming HERE.
Assumption is:
Giorgio Trombino – Vocals, Guitar, Synths
Matija Dolinar – Guitar
Claudio Troise – Bass
David Lucido – Drums
Bojan Bidovc // music enthusiast, promoter, misanthrop and sometimes a journalist as well