Beastwars Unleash Epic Video 'Wolves And Prey'

Wellington metal masters Beastwars are currently dominating the top spot of Aotearoa's album charts (just ahead of Billie Eilish) with their fourth studio album IV, released after a three year hiatus following vocalist Matt Hyde’s treatment for Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Beastwars have been touring their new record across Australasia and have now unleashed a vividly intense video for the long player's latest single 'Wolves And Prey', directed by Amber Beaton creator of darkly evocative visuals for Hex and Dark Divinity. The gorgeously filmed clip depicts the band back at full force and draws inspiration from the ancient Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh, as Beaton explained in her accompanying statement for the video...

"When I first heard the song and the title it reminded me of one of the stories in the epic of Gilgamesh where the shepherd in the story gets turned into a wolf, his own worst enemy. Then that also reminded me of a different time when I was interviewing Matthew (Beastwars vocalist) for a documentary about the new album and he had told me that while he was doing chemotherapy he had to poison himself to get better. So you have to turn into your own enemy in order to live. That's what lead me down this path. And because of that, looking more into the original story of Gilgamesh, he's on a mission to find out how to live forever. And then he finds out that of course we're all meant to die.

We're not telling the whole story of Gilgamesh, we're telling the part where he starts off on his journey. He meets the goddess of love and war and she is interested in him because he is a powerful king but he rejects her. So to teach him a lesson she sends him the bull of heaven but Gilgamesh's friend Enkidu kills the bull so she curses Enkidu because she's mad. So that really sets off Gilgamesh on this journey because he doesn't understand why that happened and wants to know if there is a way for hm to live forever. So he goes through a dark time and meets the Ferryman only to discover that death is a gift."

Read Ace Hunt's two-part interview with Beastwars about their new album 'IV', check out Part One here and Part Two over here.