The members of heavy/death metal band LYNCHPiN feel that, since the pandemic, many people have been doing everything they can to prolong their existence, but are no longer living their lives.

That shift in lifestyles inspired the five-member band to write the six songs of their third album, This Mortal Coil, which will be launched at a LYNCHPiN concert on July 6.

In a phone interview, lead vocalist Sievan Siewsarran said the album’s name is a play on the quote from Shakespare’s Hamlet: “To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life.”

He said the idea is to show the duality of life and death, how life could bring joy and suffering and to show life still has value even though human existence is frail. He said the concept album links aspects of living and dying, and speaks about life on a spectrum.

Siewsarran told Newsday the band members finished their previous album just before covid19. But during the pandemic they, like many others, personally experienced both death and new life, and were troubled by still-unanswered questions around constantly wearing masks and the covid19 vaccine.

“We started to write, not just based on the hardships, but the elation. But even in the elation of birth, from that point on, you’re protecting that person from death.

“In addition, we were coming out of an experience where, in everything we were doing, we were trying to find a different way to live.”

Out of those experiences came six new songs recorded, mixed and mastered in Montreal by Christian Donaldson, guitarist for the Canadian death metal band Cryptopsy. The songs are Asphyxiation, Chloroform and Morphine, Flatline, Hallowed Halls, Into the Temple and Omnipotent.

He said Chloroform and Morphine deals with the drugs and stimulants people use to fill the empty spaces in their lives, numb their pain or knock themselves out, from coffee, sugar and Netflix to nicotine, cocaine and heroine.

Hallowed Halls is about how heartbreak can push a person to feel so alone it feels like dying, or feeling so empty that those feelings could develop into hate or self-loathing.

Omnipotent highlighted people who were religious extremists who do not see logic or reality, but only what a book or a religious leader tells them. He said they feel righteous and superior, and that they – terrorists for example – can punish others.

Siewsarran said while writing during the early part of the pandemic, the members “started to hear the music with another guitar,” so they decided to add a second guitarist, Tristan “Shirley” Farfan. They wrote music to include him, which allowed them to draw from a wider variety of genres.

[caption id="attachment_1091885" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Members of the original rock band Cipher, which will give its debut performance at LYNCHPiN's This Mortal Coil album launch concert on July 6 at Centre of Excellence, Macoya. -  Photo