Me7amorphosis

Me7amorphosis, released on 23 February 2022, is Hibria's seventh studio album — the numeral buried in the title marks the count, and the word itself is turned on the band's own situation. In December 2017 Iuri Sanson (vocals), Eduardo Baldo (drums), Renato Osorio (guitar) and Ivan Beck (bass) all left at once; after Moving Ground appeared the following February the band went off the stage entirely. Founding guitarist Abel Camargo, the one man who had never left, brought in Victor Emeka as the new singer in October 2018 and returned to playing in Porto Alegre that December after roughly two years away. This record is what that rebuild produced, four years after its predecessor. Emeka does not trace Sanson's upper register. He sings from a thicker, lower centre of gravity, and the opening "Warcry" makes the difference plain inside a minute. "Shine" and "Raging Machine" bring back the speed and the chopped riffing the band has always run on, with Bruno Godinho, who joined in this period, on guitar. "Meaning of Life" is a dramatic ballad built on acoustic guitar and was issued as a single with a video, while "Skyline of the Soul" went out ahead of the album as the new line-up's calling card. The record's pivot is the ninth track, "Tribal Mark", on which three former members — Iuri Sanson, Diego Kasper and Renato Osorio — all guest. It reads not as a break with the past but as a statement that the previous twenty years are being carried forward rather than disowned. The album was mixed at Black Stork Studios in Caxias do Sul, Brazil, and released by Voiza Records outside Japan and by Avalon / Marquee at home as MICP-11680, the Japanese edition adding "Meaning of Life (Acoustic Version)" as a bonus track.