AT THE GATES LYRICS

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, too 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 (the abstract enthroned)
Through the concept of death (the abstract enthroned)

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 cosmic spawn

Tragedy
Coiling itself like smoke
Pollute our minds
We fall into oblivion

The abstract enthroned (the abstract enthroned)
Through the concept of death (through the concept of death)
In our brilliant tombs (in our brilliant tombs)
Of destitution and wealth (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 do not live),
We are lived (we are lived)
Pessimism (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







AT THE GATES LYRICS