Track By Tracks: Evocatus - Inevitable Death (2025)

1. Into Everlasting Night:

Vaughan: "I was really enjoying playing around with the orchestrals for this album, and Cal wrote a really cool riff which became the ending for A Fate Worse than Death. I had the idea that I could turn that piece into an intro for the album, and so I  worked on elaborating on the melody, and this piece of music was born."

2. Serpent of Chaos:

Vaughan: "This was one of the first songs written for the album. Path to Tartarus had a lot of very technical songs, and I just wanted to write something a bit more straightforward and catchy. After I had the music down, the lyrical theme was almost too obvious and basically wrote itself after a little bit of research."

3. The River Styx:

Cal: "This one was a fun challenge I set myself, inspired by a livestream I watched of Herman and Sam from Dragonforce writing a Sabaton song in ten minutes, I thought to myself, 'I'm going to write an Evocatus song in a day. I started with the main riff you hear in the verse and fleshed it out from there. For the lyrical theme, I had the idea of telling the story of a sailor who had died in battle at sea, and as he wasn't afforded his proper burial rites by having coins placed over his eyes to pay the ferryman, he is stuck in purgatory forever. I had a lot of fun with it, particularly the lyrics-writing process, including some War Pigs-level rhyming mastery with 'Hear' and 'Here' in the chorus.

4. …and Die in my Name:

Vaughan: "This song started out as the chorus riff and was built up from there. It takes a lot of guitar work, inspiration from Machine Head, and is a lot of fun to play live. The lyrical theme idea came from a specific scene from The Lord of the Rings movies".

5. In Graves Unknown:

Vaughan: "Cal put forward a song he was working on for ideas, and as soon as I heard what he had been working on, I knew exactly how to finish it. Adding a big piano-heavy chorus and some additional riffage, we ended up with one of the most collaborative and IMO best songs on the album. Once again, the feel for the song inspired the lyrics, and as soon as I had the idea in my head, they basically wrote themselves."

Cal: "Yep this is definitely a personal favourite on the album. All of the Evocatus songs do have input from everyone as a collaborative effort, but Graves was a shared songwriting effort. Every album is an evolution on the last, and one of the main ways we are evolving the sound with Inevitable Death is the introduction of dedicated clean vocals. Graves was the first song on the album to receive the cleans, and we feel they are a very welcome addition to the Evocatus sound."

6. For Death and Glory:

Vaughan: "This was the last song I put forward for the album. When I started working on it, I wanted to write something heavy. But as it progressed, it tended to sway towards the more melodic side of our spectrum. Once again, lyrics inspired by The Lord of the Rings movies. I must have been watching that a lot during whilst working on this album."

7. Devoted to Inevitable Death:

Vaughan: "I was doing a lot of research into Roman heroes at this time and came across one line which really stuck with me. Devoted to his inevitable death. This then transformed into the lyrics for another song Cal had been working on and became the title track for the album as the theme of death was more than apparent at this point in the album writing process."

Cal: "I wrote the main riff for this song just after recording finished for our last album Path to Tartarus, not quite making it in time for that release. I was listening to a lot of Beyond Creation at the time, and this main riff was inspired by the chunky intro on Omnipresent Perception. I aimed to combine this with the soaring highs and churning lows of the choruses to really give it a contrasting 'triumph through tribulation' feeling. This song also has my favourite solo on the album, very happy with how it turned out."

8. The Siren's Call:

Cal: "Every Evocatus album has to have a sea shanty in the midst somewhere (haha)! I'm a huge fan of sea shanties both in a musical sense and in how they are used as storytelling devices. Sirens was born out of wanting to convey the story of the everyday sailor encountering the terrifying Sirens from Homer's Odyssey, ultimately failing to prevent the temptation of their call and meeting their doom by smashing their ship on the rocks."

9. To Live by the Sword:

Vaughan: "I wrote half of this song in a couple of days. It was quite technical and fun to play, but I always felt something was missing. I then came back to it months later and added the melodic middle section, and it finally felt complete. Once the lyrics were written, I really wanted to find a strong female vocalist to play the part of *****, and that’s when we tracked down Maude from Sanguine Glacialis. She did a great job of portraying the character and added a new element to our sound for this song."

10. A Fate Worse than Death:

Vaughan: "I had the acoustic intro riff for this song sitting around for years. One day, I just started adding to it, and before I knew it, I had a six-minute song. But it didn’t feel complete. That's when I remembered the melodic piece that Cal had put forward some time before. It fit the end of the song perfectly and was the epic finish to the album we were looking for. After a bit of quick research, I had the lyrics smashed out and the song and album were complete."