The visual side of Chiildren is very important to us. Chad has a line in the video: “Our bodies were once young. We looked inside ourselves. Tore out pictures and sounds.” I want to suggest that our early music videos were developed through introspection. To move forward, we have to come up with a new context.

We’re looking at the history of black metal, which is very confrontational towards traditional, Judeo-Christian religious culture. Chiildren is a post-modern metal band that draws influence from black metal. But we have to put that in the context of our lives now. The major world religions have been critiqued beyond measure. It feels redundant to add anything to the conversation.

However, we can look at post-secular spirituality, or things that have developed in response to ‘the old.’ Take contemporary Satanic belief or much of new age spirituality, for example. There’s a certain narcissism about it. It suggests that we should view ourselves as gods. We can then look at this in relationship to Ayn Randian capitalist philosophy and come up with up with a metaphor to depict the economic horror that seems to have permeated the past decade: “They (the economic 1%) stole their energy through the use of black magick.”

At the same time, we recognize a counter-response to political, ecological, and economic horror. In the past, this has taken on the form of eco-terrorism, protest, activism, and so on. We feel the continuation of this paradigm appears necessary, but is ultimately of little consequence.

The writer and philosopher, Eugene Thacker, talks about the idea of ‘black’ in black metal as a form of cosmic pessimism. He asks that we envision a ‘world without us,’ one that is ‘indifferent to us as human beings, despite all we do to change, shape, to improve and even to save the world… It’s limit-thought is the idea of absolute nothingness, unconsciously represented in the many popular images of nuclear war, natural disasters, global pandemics, and the cataclysmic effects of climate change.’