Mind Burns Alive finds Pallbearer navigating the space between disquiet and serenity with a singular intensity. At times poetic and blistering, their fifth full length is a heartfelt meditation on isolation, trauma and mental breakdown, framed by the possibility of redemption and the quiet, aching beauty of escape.

Musically and lyrically stripped bare and vulnerable, Mind Burns Alive deals in universal themes of loneliness and the feeling of emotionally drowning in a world turning upside down. Bassist/vocalist Joseph D. Rowland describes the album as “an exploration of fate; when you are deceived by your own instincts and internal voice.” Guitarist / vocalist Brett Campbell furthers, “These songs are vignettes which tell the stories of people who deal with myriad sicknesses of the spirit. These are illnesses communicated by the world we live in, and the subjects are the symptoms of its disease.”

While the band's earlier catalog leaned on walls of guitar, massive distortion and piercing vocals, they achieve more on Mind Burns Alive by stripping everything back. These six songs offer a singular perspective into the pain that lies at the heart of everyday experience. Mind Burns Alive is not simply an exposition on those complex feelings. It is the musical intersection where struggle collides with the will to carry on.

Akin to the unveiling of relics carved from an oaken slab, lesser so to that which an artisan may conjure from nothing, Knoll seeks the most subtractive of efforts in its offerings. The method is unpinnable, yet is as such: something must be wrought from something else. Its materials predate their misuse; its result contradicts their lessening. A distillation of ingredients leaving but the brittle corpses of what was once unwarped by a wicked sieve - a wholly negative artifact as its response. And yet, they are familiar, as if these bringings have not been made, but rather freed. It is, then, the utmost purpose as sculptors, to be the conduits of an inhuman goal. That of an infinite testament, unmarred by the collection of dust, & outwardly dedicated to this prospect of impermeable meaning. It is not to say that the arbiter of such works is to be maligned, & especially not to put forth fronts in order to appear so, but that its output must be willed to suffer within these confines, lest it is worthless.

There exists here an affinity for the old & macabre, as well as for profuse literature & its ornaments, however not rooted in lust for their obvious and sometimes shallow aesthetic uses. Instead, as constituent references to a heightened period of artistic value, & emphasis on a deathly, morose world of creations that one may choose to see exclusively. Our namesake, an archaic term, arises from the funeral custom of a mourning bell rung in the leavings of death. It is within this moniker that we put ourselves in leanings of things ended, endings, & that which must, shall, & will end. Bygone matters of antiquity & those to be antiquated are preserved within the formless ghost of music unto time immemorial. We bring this ideal to you in its first manifestation,  As Spoken - a lecture of dilapidated language & its propensity to become riddled with sickness when kept.