A landscape of blackest hatred
A playground sits in solitude
A tranquil, eerie hum whispers through the shattered radiant souls
Giant metallic, ballistic fangs suck the blood of school-uniformed innocents
Incorporeal degenerative perversity
A shadow lingers where a body has been erased: a cruel joke, a silent witness to the violence that carved absence into the earth. The vampire, in its grotesque hunger, is at least honest in its taking: it feeds, it drinks, it leaves its victims pale but whole in death. But the hand of authority, the fist of power, does far worse. It obliterates flesh AND memory, reducing existence to nothing but a stain on the pavement; a scorchmark on the wall. What is more monstrous than a beast that does not cast a shadow? A beast that devours so thoroughly, so methodically, that all that remains is the outline of what once was? A permanent absence, a void where a life once stood. The true horror is not in fangs or fire, but in the quiet efficiency of a power that turns people into ghosts in a flash of light.
Sweden’s The Below release a truly haunting animated video today for Hitobito (Only the Shadows), a hauntingly foreboding track based on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the shadows of the victims were literally etched into stone. A surreal nightmare unfolds in the wake of unimaginable destruction. Black moths stain the air, whispering echoes of a sky once alive. The trembling hands of aged warlords unleash devastation, leaving behind only the remnants of a lost world. Schoolyards become graveyards, shadows the only survivors. A city, once bustling and vibrant, dissolves into silence, history scorched into oblivion.
“At our core, humans share much with the animal kingdom, with some traits seemingly hardwired into our species,” says frontman Bo Magnusson. “Some of our most destructive tendencies stem from this ‘immutable behaviour.’ Xenophobia, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, and the reliance on violence as a solution have echoed through the pages of history. In these dark times, we are repeatedly confronted with the shortsightedness and self-centered nature of humankind.”
Daniele Arcuri, whose past collaborations span the electronic spectrums of Vince Clarke and Pixelgrinder, delivers a devastating vision of history’s most merciless moment with Hitobito (Only the Shadows). The film unspools like a fevered recollection, a trembling hand turning pages of a book too terrible to close. It begins with the twin specters of Fat Man and Little Boy descending over a crackling newsreel—triumph stitched into tragedy, applause drowning in agony. Then, a voice cuts through the static, words lacerating the air. Bombs become weeping titans, gluttonous maws of hell yawning wide, swallowing cities whole. Smoke coils, figures dissolve, fire consumes. A world watches: some gloating, some grieving, as devastation is recorded, repeated, remembered. Greed, power, retribution—all etched in luminous oblivion. It is a reckoning, a requiem, a horror draped in the guise of progress, an unblinking gaze into the abyss left behind when the sky was torn open.
Watch below:
Bo Magnusson, the restless mind behind The Below, first clawed his way into Sweden’s underground scene with the industrial collective Dr. Evil and The Boys From Below. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, they launched an assault on convention, welding music to performance art with an arsenal of pig skulls, man-sized test tubes, levitating washing machines, and a symphony of scrap metal. Their shows rattled eardrums and sensibilities, pushing past the limits of spectacle into something rawer, louder, more unhinged. By 1992, the group had dissolved, and Magnusson disappeared from the fray. In 2015, he reemerged, chiseling out The Below from the wreckage of discarded instruments and forgotten sounds. Industrial clang met post-punk tension, machinery groaned against melody, and distortion howled through the cracks. Magnusson, ever the alchemist, reforged the raw and the ruined into something that screamed with life, scraping at the edges of the void.
Immutable Behaviour, a vinyl LP combining the band’s 2024 EPs Immutable Decay and Behaviour in Public Places, is available now on limited edition semi-transparent dark smoke vinyl and streaming on all digital platforms. Listen to Immutable Behaviour below and order the album here.
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