ROME - The Hierophant

At the end of the project’s 20th anniversary celebrations, ROME tolls in the next era of the band with two fresh and visionary albums: ‘The Hierophant’ and ‘The Tower’.

Whatever the great poets have affirmed in their finest moments is the nearest we can come to an authoritative religion or truth. It is in this spirit that ROME welcomes the listener into the temple of ‘The Hierophant’, ROME’s final album of its second decade of existence.

‘The Hierophant’ represents the enigmatic accompanying piece to the more introspective and seclusive recent work (of ‘The Tower’). Starting its journey during ‘Days of Assembly’, from the opening ‘Secret Harbour’ along ‘On Sorrow's Embankment’ to its logical finale in the mythical North with ‘Apollo of Hyperborea’, ‘The Hierophant’ is a spiritual travelogue seeking out the word and world of this ‘My Frail Ambassador’, the proclaimer of the sacred truce, interpreter of the ancestral laws and our guiding light through these darkened times.

Through a magical web looped from atmospheric guitar work, ROME founder Jérôme Reuter looks beyond the world’s grim realities as ‘The Harvest Is Not Here’. The songs are both enigmatic and touching, a strange sacrament, elusive and half-hidden, like the
gospel of a soft cult.

Musically, the radically reduced folk of earlier work is still very much present, though different in calibre. ‘The Hierophant’ proclaims its truths not from a place of solitude and remote resistance, but from the threshold of the beyond. Sprinkled with sparse percussion and dream-like string sections, the album invites the listener to participate in an aural rite of passage, invoking echoes of forgotten rituals and the tremors of inner transformation.

Reuter’s guitar work and lyrical strength is particularly strong on this release. Each track unfolds like a veiled scripture, it is a collection of layered sonic devotion adorned with symbols and spells, demanding attentive and repeated listening.

ROME’s dual release of ‘The Tower’ and ‘The Hierophant’ is a twin engine of magical splendour. Not to be missed.

LP presented on black high quality, super-audiophile 180g vinyl in reverse board printed cover with printed inner sleeve made from special untreated paper.

Tracklist:

Secret Harbour
The Harvest Is Not Here
Days of Assembly
On Sorrow’s Embankment
The Chalice and the Blade
When Light Be Gone
The Great White Hopeless
My Frail Ambassador
The Gods Are Slow to
Forgive
Apollo of Hyperborea