Hamburg doom quintet Moor have unveiled their visceral new single / video ‘Tears From Acrid Smoke’ and announced their cathartic debut album Heavy Heart, set for release on 17th May via Believe Digital.
Watch the video for ‘Tears From Acrid Smoke’ here: https://youtu.be/zh1LZSJS_gI
Stream the single and pre-save Heavy Heart here: https://moor.bfan.link/tears-from-acrid-smoke
Vocalist Ercüment Kasalar commented on ‘Tears From Acrid Smoke’: “Our first single deals with the feeling of the inner fight that you face when you burn a bridge in your life. Crossing it, getting hit by the acrid smoke of the burning pain but leaving it behind and moving on.”
The colossal sound of Heavy Heart, Moor‘s first album, is created in a vulnerable place. Loud and scratchy, desolate and intimidating, full of despair and an intimate, almost overpowering sense of yearning. And slow, draggingly slow like the shuffling step of death. “I love to move in atmospheric walls of sound, to sink into them and become one with them,” band founder Ercüment Kasalar explains his preference for doom. “I can’t do that in fast music, it’s just too hectic for my relaxed mindset.”
Heavy Heart was written and recorded by the original line-up featuring singer and guitarist Kasalar, guitarists Ben Laging and David Kaiser, bassist Christian Smukal and drummer Chad Popple. All of them have earned their spurs in other bands or projects and have appeared with Tephra, Sport, The Ocean, Gorge Trio or rha.
Moor’s sound is closer to Omega Massif or Neurosis than to Sabbath stoner clones, regurgitated and dragged into the light from deep within, that primal place where you only go when you really have to. And Moor had to, within weeks of recording, two band members were diagnosed with cancer – Ben Laging and Christian Smukal. Tragically in 2022, co-founder and bassist Smukal lost his battle, tearing a huge gap in the band’s structure. Heavy Heart is his farewell letter, his mournful legacy.
“For me, it’s a gift to be a part of Christian’s last recordings,” says guitarist David Kaiser. “The sessions together before we went into the studio were very inspiring.” Kasalar adds, “Everything we did during that time, all the strokes of fate we went through together formed this heavy heart, and it will keep beating.” In the current line-up, bassist Ralph Ulrich (Kavrila) as well as drummer Elinor Lüdde (Corecass) complete a band that operates where it really hurts.
There was never any question of not continuing the band. Because it was Christian’s wish, as Ben Laging emphasises. And now we all can hear this Heavy Heart, this gnarling, this hurting, this serious album serving as the last memory of an old friend and companion but at the same time the beginning of something new, something big.
Heavy Heart is neither overly brutal nor transfiguredly beautiful. It’s an album akin to this alluring, cruel experiment called life. It can be tough, certainly not for cowards. Instead, it’s for people who face life and who know how to savour it despite all of its heaviness. Catharsis through pain. This is Moor.
Moor are:
Ercüment Kasala – guitar / vocals
Ben Laging – guitar
David Kaiser – guitar
Ralph Ulrich – bass
Elinor Lüdde– drums
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