It’s coming for us
Divination’s true design
Step into your power
As non-beings in time
Zabus returns with Strangers of Non-Being, a hallucinatory video single that feels less like a performance and more like an incantation. The single arrives as the second single from Whores of Holyrood, Zabus’s fifth full-length in under two years. It is an unflinching song of confrontation, where Moore’s voice inhabits both beast and witness, and the music itself sounds like the sound of a country standing on its own fractured threshold.
The track unfurls as a séance of guitars, drones, and guttural rhythms carrying the weight of prophecy, each phrase pressed with the urgency of confession. At its core, the track has a psychedelic rock/gothic sound, drawing on diverse influences from the introspective balladry of Nick Cave, Tom Waits, or Michael Gira, to the trance-inducing drones of Spacemen 3, The Velvet Underground, and The Doors, to the hard rock of Lucifuge-era Danzig. Meanwhile, discordant avant-garde flourishes highlight urban and societal decay, a central lyrical theme to the album. Noise elements have been fused with traditional arrangements to create a new way of viewing and broadcasting a world crippled by corruption, religious perversity and devolution.
“With Strangers Of Non-Being, I wanted to convey what I believe are the two primary contributors to systemic generational discrimination and oppression—human instinct and established societal power dynamics,” says frontman Jeremy Moore. “In this reality, the power dynamic has been perpetually lopsided in one single direction. In an alternate reality, if the roles were switched, who’s to say it would be any different? The irony is that a human’s capacity for evil is the grand unifier beyond religion, race, ethnicity, or gender identification… Yet a human’s capacity for kindness in the face of primal instinct connects us in a transcendental way, and has the power to destroy fear based barriers permanently. The choice is ours…”
The video, directed by Moore, unfolds as a fever montage of archival fragments and uncanny tableaux, stitched together with the logic of a sanitarium nightmare. A woman drifts in a hospital bed while her mind cycles through endless corridors, grim historical portraits of evil, and unsettling sketches clawed from the recesses of the psyche.
Watch the video below:
Formed in 2023 as a loose congregation of players, Zabus has taken many shapes, but Whores of Holyrood marks a rare moment of solitary authorship. Moore performs every note, folding influences from dark blues, American folk, and avant-garde abrasion into a sound both raw and unorthodox. The record dissects the corrosive loop between authoritarian cruelty and civic paralysis, with Holyrood offered as allegory for entrenched hierarchies feeding upon resignation.
Whores of Holyrood is out now via D.C. label imprint Saccharine Underground. Listen to Strangers of Non-Being below and order the album here.
Follow Zabus:
Or via: