At The Gates
The Nightmare of Being
1. Spectre of Extinction
Our will, impersonal, blind
A gulf at the heart of the world
Dark as the absence of light
Death as the absence of all life
To touch the deepest depths
Through the denial of the will
The spectre of extinction
Eternal in its rage
The reverence and the fall
The purity of our cage
The black depths of the cosmos itself
An impersonal nothing
Demonic contagion
Indifferent and immaterial
To touch the deepest depths
Through the denial of the will
The spectre of extinction
Eternal in its rage
The reverence and the fall
The purity of our cage
The purity of our cage
Contagious, in life, in death
With cataclysmic force
The abstract is now weaponized
Into parasitic forms
Amorphous and surreal
As phantoms without face or shape
The spectre of extinction
Eternal in its rage
The reverence and the fall
The purity of our cage
The purity of our cage
2. The Paradox
Prodigious dreams, entangled and black
Coiled in the corners of life
Hallucinations, engraved in our bones
Futile, monotonous lives
The poison circle, eyes within eyes
How black our madness to be
Spectral salvation, unfurling itself
Through labyrinthian nights
To carry these dead notes
As we stare into the abyss
Our ruin, twisted and black
Into the starving void
Dehumanization of our art and culture
Parent of horrors to be
Mankind is nothing but self-conscious flesh
The triumph of our own deceit
The structures they now crumble
The fevered liturgy
Black with the scars of madness
We hide within our crypts
Through mad winds of terror
Dreams are disturbed
In pulse after heaven-wide pulse
Older than darkness, colours unknown
Within the pit of death
Heroic dreams now trampled
By figures in rust-coloured robes
A region, illuminated
Into the nuclear dawn
The structures they now crumble
The fevered liturgy
Black with the scars of madness
We hide within our crypts
And as all hope turns to black
Into the dreamless night
As all hope turns to black
Of pessimism and paradox
No hope – all black
No hope – all black
And as all hope turns to black
Into the dreamless night
As all hope turns to black
Of pessimism and paradox
Of pessimism and paradox
Of pessimism and paradox
3. The Nightmare of Being
Within its black womb
The edge of a dreamless void
Into an abyss dead
The primal chaos
In its most naked form
Submit to its blind laws
The fragmentation of
The starving universe
Turn, black
A life without world
Into an abyss of
Pure lucidity
Pitch, black
Our poisonous veil
Upon the wheel of lies
In morbid sleep of death
To perpetuate
Our impermanence
Turn, black
Our poisonous veil
The negativity
And the phenomena
Pitch, black
A life without world
The parasites of the subconscious
Our perception – From the arc of the skull
The indifference illuminated
And to nothingness we will return
The swarming absence, in darkened minds
Under a monochrome sky
Our dimension – Under attack
And now the beacon turns black
The fragmentation of
The starving universe
Our poisonous veil
Into an abyss
Of pure lucidity
Our poisonous veil
Disintegration of our masters
All of their radiance and their truth
As we vanish into havoc
And the unfathomable
The nightmare of being
Now our mutations roam blind
The nightmare of being
The nightmare of being
Now our mutations roam blind
The nightmare of being
4. Garden of Cyrus
The nameless shapes
That poison the world
A chaos at feast
In eternal return
The vertigo of freedom
That nests in the shadows
The all-devouring dead
In the fires of unbecoming
Phosphorous
Sculptured from dust
Primal
Unknown
Into the silent
Phosphorous void
Sculptured from dust
Profane
Laid bare
Into the silence
Face white (Eyes of ash)
Swallowed (White as salt)
Move beyond, move beyond life
Pattern (Luminous)
Swarming (Nebulae)
Instruments, instruments of tragedy
Phosphorous
Sculptured from dust
Primal
Unknown
Into the silent
Phosphorous void
Sculptured from dust
Profane
Laid bare
Into the silence
Into the silence
Garden of Cyrus
5. Touched by the White Hands of Death
The worship of the immaterial
The denial of death
Boneless we crawl through the night
The night without end
The dead bones of your future self
Touched by the white hands of death
The contorted mutations
The serpent dissolves
As the light in your temples burn black
In the dust of this planet
The fall into time
As the light in your temples burn black
The dead bones of your future self
Touched by the white hands of death
Repressional mechanism
Our ancestral curse
Emptied of all the illusions
Distorted since birth
The ambient plague
The sect of the last messiah
The contorted mutations
The serpent dissolves
As the light in your temples burn black
In the dust of this planet
The fall into time
As the light in your temples burn black
The dead bones of your future self
Touched by the white hands of death
In the dust of this planet
The fall into time
Touched by the white hands of death
Touched by the white hands of death
6. The Fall into Time
Our curse
The fall into time
(Our curse)
Now cross
The threshold of death
(Now cross)
Through tempest and fire and a night without end
Transcending all illusion
With violent precision and destructive intent
Into the pit of death
To search for the answers – Outside of yourself
A civilization of dreaming death
To work among, your darkest of dreams
The eternal wound of existence
Bound to the horrors, the horrors of life
This paranoia of the heart
By trauma exhausted – Oblivion tamed
Through fear and corruption – To deep to explain
The hallucinations – Perverted through time
Primordial nightmares – A horror divine
Adoration of our primeval dread
In the darkest of illusions dead
These virgin sunsets
This dimensional complex torn
Through disintegration
Now cross (Now cross)
The threshold of death
Our curse
The fall into time
(Our curse)
To search for the answers
Outside of yourself
A civilization
The Fall into time
Adoration of our primeval dread
In the darkest of illusions dead
These virgin sunsets
This dimensional complex torn
Through disintegration
Now cross (Now cross)
The threshold of death
Our curse
The fall into time
(Our curse)
7. Cult of Salvation
Sculptured from dust, hallucinations
Through nights of obsidian black
The sacrificial city, illuminated
Premonitions from the nuclear void
Inter-dimensional incarcerations
Invoking chaos and flame
Upon the throne, the abomination
Cerebral horror, cerebral horror profane
Inherited strife and destitution
Under a sky without stars
In ecstasy blind, we tear through the night
Dressed in our tears and our scars
Inter-dimensional incarcerations
Invoking chaos and flame
Upon the throne, the abomination
Cerebral horror, cerebral horror profane
Our purgatorial glow
The wasteland of unreasoning
Desolate and perilous
In dim transparency
The magnetism of recoil
And luminous duality
As whispered pictures fall
Through stratospheric purity
Phenomena of suffering
Through dreams of prophecy
Cult of salvation, the end reborn
Absence of color, void of form
Inter-dimensional incarcerations
Invoking chaos and flame
Upon the throne, the abomination
Cerebral horror, cerebral horror profane
8. The Abstract Enthroned
Through distorted mutations
The aberration born
Crowned in madness perverted
Piercing through our form
Necropolis
The scourge of dying worlds
Through barren lands
We march into oblivion
The abstract enthroned
Through the concept of death
Resignation, voiceless deaths
With graves that beat in empty chests
Wretched, the ruins
Polluted obsolete
Primal, the hunger
Eternal in our own defeat
The repressional virus
Our global blackened dawn
All existence is futile
Inhuman cosmicspawn
Tragedy
Coiling itself like smoke
Pollute our minds
We fall into oblivion
The abstract enthroned
Through the concept of death
In our brilliant tombs
Of destitution and wealth
With graves that beat in empty chests
9. Cosmic Pessimism
There's a ghost that grows inside of us, damaged in the making
And there's a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned
Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought
There's a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burned all the way down
Arabesque ink wandering, winds itself around our ovate dreams
We seem to speak only in the imprecise geometries of black volcanic sands
Huge, impossibly regular shapes of rutted charcoal rocks hover above us
As if waiting
We do not live, we are lived
Pessimism, the last refuge of hope
From a blurred horizon, quiet black basalt pools
Bore into the rocks and our own patiently withering bones
Slumbering swells of a salt-borne amnesia course through our fibrous limbs
Scorched, wandering
Brine secretes from every pore
The luminous point where logic becomes contemplation
Lost in thought, dreamless sleep, adrift in deep space
A black glow in the deepest sleepwalking seas
We do not live, we are lived
Pessimism, the last refuge of hope
Around you this night, a thousand million firefly anatomies
Breathe in and out in their slow burning, liturgical glow
Impersonal sadness, to become overgrown, like a ruin
We do not live, we are lived
Pessimism, the last refuge of hope
We do not live, we are lived
Pessimism, the last refuge of hope
We do not live, we are lived
Cosmic pessimism, the last refuge of hope
10. Eternal Winter of Reason
Primordial insignificance
The inner presence of death
Testimony to our futility
Beyond the personal self
From glacial silence deaf
Baptized in the form of death
Like the hunger of a tempest blind
Like into open graves
We keep falling
The absolute, the phenomena
Eternal winter of reason
The emptiness, the indifference
Eternal winter of reason
Irrevocable, all-devouring
Our lives inverted through time
The cyclopean fabrications
Our death it roars in our minds
The hallucinations
Preserve the illusion
Disembodied, eternal
We open to death
Irrevocable, all-devouring
The absolute, the phenomena
Eternal winter of reason
The emptiness, the indifference
Eternal winter of reason
Lyrics in plain text format
