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Like bearing witness to a world sliding headlong into the abyss, Beastwars are no strangers to soundtracking times of war, disaster, and collapse – when half-truths and hidden agendas lurk behind every act of the world’s eroding empires.
From the very beginning, their music has embodied the apocalyptic feeling of these end times: primal, hypnotic, and relentlessly heavy. Their 2011 self-titled debut declared as much, and tragically, feels more relevant today than ever. Fourteen years later, the world has only grown harsher and Beastwars’ sixth record, The Ship // The Sea, distils that darkness into one of the most intense and cathartic albums of their career.

In 2021 and 2023, the band toured their first two albums in full. Revisiting that early material reignited the raw energy at their core, inspiring them to strip back the progressive flourishes of recent years and reconnect with the heaviness of their origins. The Ship // The Sea channels that spirit into towering riffs and unflinching emotion, unfolding like a sequence of hellish headlines. Mute the endless stream of calamities on your screen and you’ll find Beastwars’ heavy howls creating an eerily apocalyptic soundtrack for the present day.

“Life has become a marathon for most people,” says frontman Matthew Hyde. “How can we not all see the injustice, the cruelty of the world? This album is like Picasso’s Guernica—a reflection of war and horror, of endings and upheavals. It is the sound of a ship adrift on a cruel sea.”

Water runs as the central motif throughout the record, the ship representing the body and the sea symbolising life. Lyrically, the songs traverse survival, purification, wisdom, and healing, always with an undercurrent of danger and the fight to endure.

To capture this vision, Beastwars decided that they needed to record by the ocean. They decamped to Studio 11b near the beach in Mount Maunganui then completed the album back in their hometown of Wellington, once again working alongside longtime collaborator James Goldsmith. Having co-produced the band’s last three albums and engineered their live shows, Goldsmith was the ideal partner to harness their ferocity with heightened intensity.

As ever, the music is paired with artwork by Nick Keller (Weta Workshop: Narnia, Avatar, The Hobbit). His vast oil painting for The Ship // The Sea is both terrifying and transcendent, an otherworldly vision that mirrors the sound within.