Katatonia – Dethroned & Uncrowned

Dear “Katatoniacs”,
First off, we wanna say that we’re completely happy with the outcome and success of ‘Dead End Kings’, but truth to be told, we saw a potential in going in a different and unexplored direction with the same material. Our instincts told us that this would be both intriguing and captivating to revoke the loud and aggressive sound picture dominant on the album and instead give way to the atmosphere and tranquillity lurking beneath. This eventually became an urge, so a few months later down the road we decided it was time to re-visit this project, but indulge in new creative experimentation.
So, it’s our wish to release the entire album in a stripped down, semi-acoustic way and turn things around completely and we are asking you, the fans, to help us do this by Pledging the various album formats and other exclusive items we have made available. By doing so you can check back regularly to find out about our campaign and the album’s progress.
The synopsis is simple and album title won’t lie; the drums will be dethroned and the distorted rhythm guitars will be uncrowned! Instead, we’ll place the emphasis on the many layers of ambience, with the melodies staying central and the vocal harmonies representing the heart of the album. Also by pledging you are helping the bands ability to be able to tour further afield. Although the songs are the same and the track listing doesn’t change, we hope the end result is something entirely different! Think of the album like a person’s face in the hands of a surgeon, whose appearance is gonna change, but it’s still the same person behind that face and we guess an important factor, in this case, would be that the surgeon itself is obviously Katatonia, not a stranger! If there’s one album in our repertoire that’s suited for a thing like this, it’s ‘Dead End Kings’.
We’ll be doing this in partnership with our record label’s imprint division Kscope Music who specialise in these kind of releases, but we would also like to involve you, our dear fans from the start to make this an album we can all cherish and be proud of forevermore. The aim is to have the album released by September 9th of this year.
In order to do this we have cleared out our rehearsal room and parent’s attics and found some long lost treasures that we’re sure will be of interest to some of you and will allow you to be part of making this album a reality. You can see the gems we found on the right hand side and we hope that there’s something to your liking between the selections of common goods, historic memorabilia and the more exclusive services.
We’ll be working towards a minimum income to make this record possible and you’ll be able to keep track of our progress on the percentage bar above.
Thanks for checking in
Cheers!
Anders, Jonas, Daniel, Sodo & Nille