Battle Against Damnation

Battle Against Damnation is the mini-album that followed the first full-length Awakening from Abyss, released on 6 June 2018 as VICL-65007: four songs, about twenty-one minutes. It was made as a stand-alone record whose songs would not later be folded into an album, a shape the band used again for Glory, Glory, to the World in 2021. The lead track "The Crusade" carries the British heavy metal the band had spent the previous year close to, having played London and a UK festival. "Break The Wall" is the first song miho and miyako wrote together, and it looks like a straight thrash push until the middle section changes the weather entirely. The interesting pair is "Above The Black Sea" and "Under The Red Sky". miyako wrote the first, Mao of Light Bringer the second, and both are two classically trained writers turning the same influence — Sergei Rachmaninoff — into metal. The symmetry in the titles is the symmetry in the writing. On the title, miho said that everyone is fighting something every day, and asami that the gravest opponent of all is fate, which is why there are times a person has to push back against what they were handed. Four songs is not long, and the idea holds all the way through them.