Across the Empty Plains is driven by furious Swedish black metal, laced with death and thrash influences, yet haunted throughout by Devourer’s signature sense of vast, crushing cosmic dread. Completed in September 2016, then buried in darkness as John’s mental collapse and seven electro-convulsive shock treatments cast it into silence. Lost. Forgotten. For months it waited in the void, until it was unearthed and released on May 25th, 2017. Days later, on June 1st, Iron, Blood & Death Corporation gave it physical form — the first Devourer album entrusted to the label. Lyrically, Across the Empty Plains is a bleak passage through inner collapse and cosmic negation, where psychological torment and metaphysical emptiness mirror one another. The album charts a progression from anxiety, madness, and self-loathing toward a stripped-down acceptance of annihilation, with humanity depicted as both prisoner and executioner of its own existence. Gods are absent or meaningless, hope is exposed as illusion, and suffering becomes a lens through which clarity is painfully attained. Across visions of disease, rage, isolation, and extinction, the lyrics frame life as a slow procession across barren ground — toward dissolution, where identity erodes, resistance fades, and everything finally returns to nothing. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.