Having already worked with Tom Clements’ bands Everest Queen and Orme, it was great to work with him on a third music project, the wild and wonderful Praetorian. After a slew of crushing and insane EPs, Praetorian have really stepped up everything for their debut full length Pylon Cult, recorded with Wayne Adams (Petbrick, Big Lad) at his Bear Bites Horse Studio in London and released through APF Records. Pylon Cult is such a metal lover’s metal album. By that I mean, for those who appreciate many varying styles of metal, there will be much to appreciate here. Praetorian have a very natural way of blending subgenres to such a point that you can’t really pinpoint them to one particular style. There are equal moments of sludge, doom, hardcore punk, thrash, black, death and more. Pylon Cult is without a doubt cutthroat, energetic and madly relentless, yet it still has plenty of groove, melodicism and texture to be found too. The album is such a ride, and I love how darkly humorous and sardonic the lyrics are too. Thankfully the album was widely covered and praised, so I’m really glad that my amazing network of journalists appreciates Praetorian so much.
ACCOLADES
“Praetorian bring the dirtiest riffs from the sludge scene and pair them with black metal starkness… Raging, screaming, growling and grunting their often sarcastic, satirical words and gargantuan chunks of riffage.”
~ 9/10 Musipedia Of Metal
“Pylon Cult is a grotty, no-fucks-given sludge record, but there’s a lot of depth here beneath the molasses thick churn.”
~ The Quietus
“From blistering slabs of disgusting sludge to the ethereal haunting atmospheres of black metal, Pylon Cult strides from the forest, swinging its maul and sweeping enemies aside left and right.”
~ Noizze
FROM THE PRESS KIT
The saying always goes that it’s grim up North… But filthy and brutal sludge quartet PRAETORIAN are living proof that it’s even grimmer down South! Building on three promising and acclaimed EPs, the menacing Hertfordshire quartet return with their debut full length album PYLON CULT. A new lesson in vile, disgusting and gruesome blackened sludge metal, mixed in a volatile cocktail of death metal, thrash and hardcore. Praetorian are here to take you on a wild ride with an album that fluctuates between hi-octane energy, colossal doomy riffs, a savage dual-vocal attack and insane tempo changes, all culminating in a violent, nightmarish thrill ride.
A wave of ear piercing guitar feedback drenches the listener on opening track and leading single ‘Fear & Loathing In Stevenage’, beginning a journey into sadistic sludge savagery. A tongue-in-cheek homage to the quartet’s Hertfordshire hometown, Praetorian set a high precedent from the start, bringing together blistering speed and ferocity that suddenly implodes into acid tongued doom riffs that stomp and crush the earth. Thus begins an exploration into total nihilism bleached in Praetorian’s dark sardonic sense of humour – an extreme and angry diatribe of modern day living in Britain, channeling layers of hostility, hopelessness and social division. The title Pylon Cult comes from contemporary British author David Southwell’s imagined county Hookland in which a so-called cult begin to worship pylons in order to harness their energy.
Released on January 31st 2025 on CD, Cassette and Digital through APF Records.
PR TRAIL 