Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay share "Old Fire"

Mathias Kom and Michael Cloud Duguay have unveiled “Old Fire”, a sprawling and volatile new track taken from their forthcoming collaborative album Closed City, due 27 March via Watch That Ends The Night Records.

Clocking in at nearly eight minutes, “Old Fire” sits at the heart of the record’s early sequence—both musically and conceptually. Where the album’s opening moments sketch the contours of an imagined, isolated settlement, this latest release plunges beneath the surface, into the furnace that quietly sustains it: an ancient industrial core still tended by inhabitants who no longer remember why.

The track mirrors that descent. It begins with a restrained, almost delicate tonal passage before rupturing into something far more abrasive—distorted guitars and blastbeat percussion colliding under dense harmonic tension. From there, it moves unpredictably between extremes: icy ambient stretches give way to bursts of chaotic propulsion, while shards of brass improvisation cut through like sonic fault lines.

Speaking on the track, Duguay describes a deliberate push-and-pull at its core—an attempt to balance opposites, tension and release, structure and collapse. The result is a piece that feels both meticulously constructed and constantly on the verge of disintegration.

Kom adds that “Old Fire” centres on the symbolic engine of Closed City: a nameless force maintained out of habit rather than understanding, embodying the album’s wider themes of ritual, isolation, and inherited systems.

The album itself was conceived during a two-week residency in the frozen archipelagos of North Karelia, Finland, where the pair developed its conceptual framework while surrounded by extreme winter conditions and the remnants of a WWII-era defence line. Drawing from the history of Soviet “closed cities”—off-map settlements built around secrecy and industry—Closed City imagines a place cut off from the outside world, its residents locked into cycles of labour and quiet paranoia.

Musically, the project fuses experimental metal, folk elements, and orchestral brass into a dense, shifting sound world. Composed initially on an out-of-tune piano battling sub-zero temperatures, the arrangements lean into instability and texture, echoing the psychological landscape of the record’s narrative.

Recorded later in a decommissioned church in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and mixed by Ky Brooks, Closed City brings together a wide ensemble of collaborators, weaving guitars, synths, field recordings, voice, and a six-piece low-brass section into a cohesive, immersive whole.

With “Old Fire”, Kom and Duguay offer a striking glimpse into that world—one that burns quietly beneath the surface, long after its original purpose has been lost.

Closed City is out 27 March via Watch That Ends The Night Records.