Salt Lake City’s doom metal conjurors Hibernaut return with Obsidian Eye, a six-track conceptual journey into death, decay, and the perversion of rebirth. Dropping July 11th, 2025, the album will be self-released digitally and issued on vinyl in partnership with Olde Magick Records.

Blending doom, stoner, sludge, and heavy psychedelia, Obsidian Eye tells a harrowing tale of infection, resurrection, and the unknowable will of an alien intelligence. Set in a pre-industrial world teetering on the edge of understanding, the album explores the question: Who decides when to die?

ALBUM DETAILS

• Title: Obsidian Eye

• Artist: Hibernaut

• Release Date: July 11, 2025

• Format: Self-released (Digital) / Vinyl via Olde Magick Records

• Genre: Doom Metal / Stoner / Sludge / Heavy Psychedelic

• Tracklist:

  1. Engorge Behemoth

  2. Venatic Rite

  3. Pestiferous

  4. Obsidian Eye

  5. Revenants

  6. Beset

Produced, mixed, and mastered by Andy Patterson
Cover Art by Jordan Barlow
Layout by Goran Nilsson

PRE-RELEASE SINGLES + VIDEOS

• May 9, 2025 — Obsidian Eye (single) + exclusive B-side Goner, with a video for Goner

• June 13, 2025 — Beset (single) + exclusive B-side Dark-Light, with a video for Dark-Light

AVAILABILITY

Obsidian Eye will be available on all major streaming platforms and for physical purchase via Bandcamp through Hibernaut and Olde Magick Records.

Artwork Description – Obsidian Eye

Painting by Jordan Barlow

Rendered in haunting sepia tones, Jordan Barlow’s artwork for Obsidian Eye is a nocturnal vision of death, ritual, and return — perfectly mirroring the cosmic horror narrative of Hibernaut’s concept album.

The scene unfolds aboard a weathered wooden vessel adrift in dark, churning seas. Its deck is occupied by cloaked figures — gaunt, mournful, and silent — swathed in robes that obscure their faces and forms. Their postures are solemn, ceremonial, as they move among tightly wrapped cadaverous bundles laid in rows on the deck. These shrouded bodies, lifeless yet central, evoke the album’s recurring questions of mortality, rebirth, and the thin veil between the animate and inanimate.

Dim lantern light spills across the ship’s timbers, casting long shadows and giving a sense of suspended time. The sail lines and rigging twist overhead like spider silk, while stars dot the ominous, cloud-swallowed sky. In the background, other robed figures drift in and out of visibility, their faces obscured, suggesting a procession that stretches beyond the frame — or perhaps through time itself.

The entire composition pulses with tension: a reverence for death and a dreadful anticipation of resurrection. Barlow captures a liminal moment — not of mourning, but of transformation. It is unclear whether the figures are preparing the dead for rest or calling them back from beyond, and that ambiguity is central to the album’s mythos.

Obsidian Eye’s artwork is not just an illustration — it is a visual hymn to the unknown, a ceremonial freeze-frame at the threshold of life and death, where reanimation is not miracle, but mandate.

THE STORY: A COSMIC HORROR IN SIX ACTS

1.  From the primordial dark emerges "Engorge Behemoth" — a malevolent cosmic entity awakens in a dimension outside time, its mind forming like synapses from void-stuff. Seeking to extend itself, it manifests in countless parasitic forms, feeding on consciousness.

2.  In "Venatic Rite", hunters journey into a cursed forest seeking sustenance for their village. They return not only wounded, but changed—fevered, delirious, and slowly consumed from within by a mutating disease. The infection is more than microbial — it's something other.

3.  By "Pestiferous", the sickness advances, death is the result. A ritual is whispered of — a voyage to a distant land where reanimation might be possible. Corpses are smuggled onto ships under cover of night. Necromancy begins.

4.  ”Obsidian Eye", the album’s centerpiece, unfolds in a fever dream of black rites and alien gods. Tattooed priests, gaunt and sexless, perform a rite beneath a waxing moon. Dead bodies are dipped in an obsidian pool, rising again — animated by a force older than time, neither benevolent nor cruel, but hungry. The villagers who welcome them back do not understand the price.

5.  The living dead return in "Revenants", their memories fractured. The ship that bore them is lost in mist, its crew vanishing, driven to madness by sea leviathans. The reanimated move with alien intent, puppets of a will unseen. A village celebrates too soon — and too blindly.

6.  In the final act, "Beset", the doom becomes inescapable. Half the village vanishes in a night. The returned have become vessels. Ritual slaughter feeds the obsidian pool, and a lone hermit — the last witness — watches it overflow. He alone understands the truth: This was never resurrection. It was assimilation.

“Writing this album was focused and purposeful, lyrically and musically, I feel like we really hit our stride and solidified

our direction.” says -Dave Jones

“In the 20+ years I’ve been at my studio, I’ve never had a noise/loudness complaint, until Hibernaut entered the studio.”

-Andy Patterson (Boar’s Nest Studio)

BIO

Hibernaut is a heavy hybrid of doom, stoner, and sludge metal hailing from Salt Lake City, Utah. The band formed in 2021 when guitarist/vocalist Dave Jones (Subrosa, Dwellers, Oxcross) and drummer Zach Hatsis (Subrosa, Dwellers) reconnected creatively after years of collaboration. Joined by bassist Josh Dupree and, later, lead guitarist Matt Miller (Thunderfist, Oldtimer), Hibernaut quickly found their stride—channeling decades of collective experience into a powerful, riff-laden sound described as "a heavy blend of progressive sounds that harks back to the classic days of High On Fire, Mastodon and SLEEP" (Steve Howe, Outlaws of the Sun).

Their 2023 debut album Ingress was recorded with producer Andy Patterson and landed at #15 on The Doom Charts, with tracks like “Lantern Eyed” and “Spherical” praised for their crushing weight and psychedelic depth. Now, the band is set to release their second full-length record, Obsidian Eye, on July 11, 2025—an even darker, more expansive chapter in the Hibernaut saga. With a growing live presence and deep roots in the underground, Hibernaut continues to evolve, building a reputation as one of the West’s most promising heavy bands.

For fans of: High On Fire, YOB, Mastodon, SLEEP, Neurosis

FFO: Doom metal, Sludge, Stoner rock, Psychedelic heaviness

Zach Hatsis (drums)         Matt Miller (lead guitar)       Dave Jones (vocals and rhythm guitar)      Josh Dupree (bass guitar)