Interviews About Albums: Graveborn - Metempsychosis (2026)

In this new interview, we sat down with the American Progressive Death Metal band Graveborn to ask questions about their album "Metempsychosis". 

1. What can you say about this new EP/CD?

Johnny, our vocalist, lays it out pretty clearly:

"Metempsychosis is a concept album about continuity in the face of collapse.

At its core, the record explores what persists when identity, memory, belief, and meaning are systematically dismantled. Rather than framing destruction as tragedy or rebirth as triumph, the album treats collapse as a necessary process through which existence transmits itself forward.

The journey begins internally, within the mind. Thought turns predatory, perception distorts, and the self fractures under its own weight. From there, the scope widens outward to examine intelligence, progress, and survival at the scale of society and species. The album challenges the assumption that complexity guarantees endurance and confronts the idea that extinction, both personal and collective, begins with the loss of meaning rather than physical death.

As the narrative unfolds, the focus shifts to memory and identity under erosion. Cognitive decline, inherited behavior, and imagined alternate lives reveal the self as unstable and contingent. Authority and belief systems are exposed as hollow structures that thrive on surrender rather than understanding. Parallel futures dissolve, leaving only the lived path as something real.

At the center of the album, Metempsychosis names the governing principle of the record: existence as transmission. Consciousness, ideas, instincts, and patterns move forward across lives, generations, and forms. Death is not an ending but a relay point. The cycle does not repeat unchanged. It adapts, learns, and evolves.

Beyond this realization, the self dissolves into continuity. Consciousness is no longer owned by an individual but experienced as a current that flows through all forms. This expansion is tempered by a return to constraint, where inherited systems, biological and psychological, limit autonomy and reveal identity as an emergent product of interacting forces.

The emotional center of the album anchors the cosmic in the personal through grief. Loss without physical form reshapes identity and demonstrates that meaning does not require presence, memory, or proof. Love persists as transformation rather than possession.

The record then confronts the underlying mechanism that governs all of this change: an indifferent process that consumes bodies, minds, ideas, and returns them altered. This system is not moral or cruel. It is inevitable. Resistance is futile, not because it is punished, but because it is irrelevant.

The album closes with forced evolution. What survives does not do so because it is whole, healed, or chosen. It survives because it functions. Form changes. Essence persists. Adaptation replaces identity.

Metempsychosis is not a story of hope or despair. It is a meditation on continuity without comfort, identity as a temporary structure, and survival as adaptation rather than victory.

It asks a single question and follows it to its conclusion:

What remains when everything else is gone?"

2. What is the meaning of the EP/CD name?

Metempsychosis is a philosophical concept that refers to the transmigration of the human soul after death. Although the term generally implies reincarnation, as Johnny mentions above, we're not using it quite that way - instead, it is about continuation after an event that fundamentally alters your state of being.

3. Which one is the composer of the CD/EP?

This was a purely collaborative work - all 5 of us contributed in many different ways.

4. If you had to pick one song, which one would you pick?

The title track, Metempsychosis, is the thesis statement of the album lyrically and compositionally. It's the song that captures everyone in the band at their best - Marc's dominance of time, Jesse's aggressiveness, Reggie's stability and cohesion, Chris's sense of melody and arrangement, and Johnny's vocal versatility and lyrical depth. In Johnny's words:

"This is the core statement of the album.

It’s the track where everything shifts from what is happening to me to what is happening through me.

Metempsychosis is not a cute spiritual idea here. It’s a brutal, continuous process. The soul persists across lifetimes, but not in a sentimental way. It persists through reconstruction, through collapse, through the repeated loss of form. It’s endurance through transformation.

A key layer for me is this. Ideas move the way souls move. They don’t just appear. They transfer. They are inherited. They go dormant. They reawaken. They show up inside someone like a realization, but they may have been traveling through bloodlines, culture, trauma, resilience, and repetition for generations.

This is not passive. It’s evolutionary. Each cycle reshapes what it carries forward. The self is not a fixed object. It’s a changing vessel. The essential nature persists, but the expression changes, sometimes violently.

The chorus fragments because language breaks at the edge of this understanding. The more I try to explain it, the less accurate it becomes. What remains is recognition. Ego fades. Boundaries dissolve. Self becomes pattern. Awareness becomes primary.

This song means: I’m not the origin of who I am. I’m part of a continuum. My life is not a standalone story. It’s one iteration in a larger transmission."

5. Is there a special message in this EP/CD? If there is what it is?

Change is not always about being for the better or for the worse - instead, it is the natural state that everything experiences in some way. Instead of approaching change as something that results in a better or worse you, casting that aside and viewing it as a process can help you cope.

6. Are there some lyrics that you'd love to share?

This section from our latest single, Orthologs, summarizes a lot of the album pretty well:

Descend to sink into stone

Destroy to carve out the shape

Devolve to fracture the cage

Die to live beyond the self

I am not what I've lost

I am what I've survived

Shedding skin in violent rebirth

Phoenix throes in crimson skies

7. Which inspirations have been important for this album? Like musically or friends, family, someone you'd love to thank especially?

Strangely, a lot of the dedications we'd like to make are a result of things that happened when the album was nearly done. Multiple band members lost family towards the end of the recording process, and it altered the perception of the content, both musically and lyrically. It didn't make the album better or worse - just recontextualized. Change will come at you fast and restructure everything you thought you were sure about.

8. Something to add?

Although there are big concepts here, we still fundamentally make music we love. We try to meld the aggression and melodicism that all members in the band seek out in their daily listening. If you don't care about the lyrics and concept, stay for the riffs. We love a good one.

Support independent metal journalism — Visit the official BTC store