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Ghost Palace
Release Date: March 7, 2025

Full Album Stream

Album Cover

Ghost Palace Album Cover Digital.jpg

SIDE A
Celebrities in Cemeteries
My Home Planet
Brazil Nuts and Blue Curaçao
Luna FM
What Does it Do and How Does it Work

 

SIDE B
Bottle of Chianti, Cheese and Charcuterie Board
Summer Olympics
Duck vs. Decorated Shed
Birds of Australia
Strange Paradise
Ghost Palace

 

mp3 download of entire album

Praise for Ghost Palace

"... never less than surprising and often approaches a kind of poetry, profane and profound in equal measure." - KLOF

"a warm, wonderful celebration of how the songwriter can help interpret an increasingly unfathomable world." - The Arts Desk

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“Kom's lyricism remains an unparalleled firehose of cultural references and wry outsider observations.”
-Some Party

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Bottle of Chianti, Cheese and Charcuterie Board

Released: January 7, 2025

Music Video by Graeme Patterson

Luna FM

Released: February 4, 2025

The Burning Hell created a four-part radio broadcast for campus and community radio stations inspired by the song.

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See broadcast times here.

"...the musical biopic of a protagonist living life at surface level where nothing means anything, as the opening line, “Let’s have a baby, let’s watch a movie,” illustrates, a life stuffed with empty relationships, ever more luxurious possessions and the consumption of the titular cold cuts in shabby chic bistros. We follow him through divorce, death and reincarnation, ready for the whole sorry process to begin again. It’s told with The Burning Hell’s trademark wry humour and Kom’s knack for a delightfully constructed rhyming couplet, and backed with the unorthodox combination of pleasingly plinky-plonky synths, drum machine, double bass and a cosmic banjo solo – it’s a line-up that works so well it’s a wonder it’s not done more often.

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Kicking the bucket has never sounded so good.

 

Consider us suitably enthused for the forthcoming album – we look forward to going to a better place with The Burning Hell when it’s released in March."

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-Joyzine

Bio

The Burning Hell is the ongoing musical project of songwriter Mathias Kom and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Sharratt, often including additional comrades and collaborators. Their densely populated genre-shifting songs are packed with an abundance of literary, historical, and pop-cultural forebears, heroes and villains, subjects and objects, stories and hooks. They move with heavy rhyme and a light step, incorporating a frequent fixation on apocalypse and ruin into work that celebrates participation in a mutually created, ever surprising, and even occasionally beautiful world. Which is to say they’re good dance partners and they want to dance with you.

 

Now based in the woods of rural Epekwitk (Prince Edward Island), The Burning Hell has famously ventured to every out-of-the-way island and inland neglected by the less adventurous, emphasizing presence and connection across latitudes, longitudes, and time, affirming a commitment to the political power of sharing music. It is a profoundly optimistic gesture delivered by way of killer tunes and joyful live performances.

 

When Mathias and Ariel aren’t on the road or in the studio with the band, they pursue art projects at the intersection of ecology and sound with their collective Idlefield Art Lab. Recent ventures have included mobile, solar-powered recording studios in Scotland and Canada, and off-grid recording projects in abandoned farms and lighthouses.

 

‘Ghost Palace,’ The Burning Hell's newest album, will be released on March 7, 2025 on You've Changed Records in North America and BB*Island everywhere else.

PHOTOS BY JUSTIN RIX

TBH by Justin Rix 2 for web.jpg
TBH by Justin Rix 1 for web .jpg

PHOTOS BY GRAEME PATTERSON

The Burning Hell_Space_by Graeme Patterson.jpg
The Burning Hell_Restaurant_by Graeme Patterson.jpg
The Burning Hell_Tunnel_by Graeme Patterson.jpg

Album Promo Text (Short Version)

The Burning Hell have been writing party anthems about the apocalypse since before the apocalypse arrived at the party. With “Ghost Palace,” the band presents their most joyful collection of songs about death to date, always finding something to smile about in the decay. Mathias Kom’s maximalist lyrics are underlined with fluorescent highlighter, with surprising twists and turns through pop culture, animal life, history, architecture, and science fiction. Pathos and bathos vie for equal time, the sublime snuggling up with the trivial, revealing moments of humour and beauty in the mire. 

 

But “Ghost Palace” doesn’t dwell directly on the end of the world. Instead, the songs assume that our time running out is a foregone conclusion, and focus instead on what we might leave behind when we go, what might endure, and what surprises might be found amidst the remnants. Memory and the debatable usefulness of nostalgia are primary concerns here, peppered with occasional suggestions that we just might still contain the tiny, hopeful seeds of our own redemption through community and balance. 

 

The Burning Hell will be touring “Ghost Palace” throughout 2025.

Album Promo Text (Long Version)

The Burning Hell have been writing party anthems about the apocalypse since before the apocalypse arrived at the party. With “Ghost Palace,” the band presents their most joyful collection of songs about death to date, always finding something to smile about in the decay. Mathias Kom’s maximalist lyrics are underlined with fluorescent highlighter, with surprising twists and turns through pop culture, animal life, history, architecture, and science fiction. Pathos and bathos vie for equal time, the sublime snuggling up with the trivial, revealing moments of humour and beauty in the mire. 

 

But “Ghost Palace” doesn’t dwell directly on the end of the world. Instead, the songs assume that our time running out is a foregone conclusion, and focus instead on what we might leave behind when we go, what might endure, and what surprises might be found amidst the remnants. Memory and the debatable usefulness of nostalgia are primary concerns here, peppered with occasional suggestions that we just might still contain the tiny, hopeful seeds of our own redemption through community and balance.    

 

Though the core of the band remains the duo of Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt, working from their home in the woods of eastern Prince Edward Island, frequent collaborator Jake Nicoll produced and mixed “Ghost Palace”, and newest band member Maria Peddle added fiddle and vocals. The band solicited additional help from Steven Lambke (lead guitar), Carlie Howell (double bass), Amy Nicoll (oboe) and José Contreras (organ).

 

“Ghost Palace” offers a densely layered journey, with genre-crossing elements and instrumentation, and frequent nods to unexpected influences. “Brazil Nuts and Blue Curaçao” is the band’s take on “Margaritaville” for the post-apocalyptic vacationer, a beach jam about an abandoned resort where - in spite of collapse and ruin - a kind of broken utopia emerges. 

 

Elsewhere, the band finds things to dance about in the scrap-pile of human memory. “Bottle of Chianti, Cheese and Charcuterie Board” is an off-kilter synth and double-bass hip-shaker about the ways we reduce our lives to the fragments of bourgeois luxury that we can’t take with us when we go. “Summer Olympics” is a rock song about the strange, hyper-specific moments that stick in our minds, hinting that details might be more important than the broader strokes of time.

 

But instead of taking an entirely dim view of our collective humanity, The Burning Hell searches for (and always finds) things to celebrate. “Celebrities in Cemeteries” is a joyful ode to the relationship between fame and mortality, and the ways our death rituals can retroactively beautify and dramatize a life. “Duck vs. Decorated Shed” is a country song that takes the ground-breaking architectural theories of Rob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown as a metaphor for not being afraid of showing the world exactly what you are.

 

“Ghost Palace” also wonders at the post-planet future. After we finish making Earth uninhabitable for ourselves, where do we go, and who gets to go there? Are heaven and outer space the same thing? “My Home Planet” is sung from the perspective of two Earthlings arriving on a new world, trying to convince the local administration to let them stay in spite of how badly they’ve botched things back home. “Luna FM” is the story of the first radio station on the moon, helmed by the galaxy’s loneliest DJ.

 

Finally, long after we’re gone, what if the last creature that remembers our species is a small brown bird at an abandoned service station? And what happens when the bird gets distracted by something shiny, and forgets all about us? “Strange Paradise” is a eulogy for our fragments, dressed in a rickety skeleton of acoustic noise. Album-closer “Ghost Palace” is a farewell to the abandoned castle of our memories: “We’ll leave all the lights on / We’ll see them shine for a while, after we’ve gone… Goodbye, cool world!”

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Album Credits

Ghost Palace was made by Mathias Kom, Ariel Sharratt, Jake Nicoll and Maria Peddle, with special guests:

 

Carlie Howell - double bass (tracks 6 & 9) 

Steven Lambke - electric guitar  (4 & 11)

Amy Nicoll - oboe (5), vocals (9)

José Contreras - organ (5), vocals (1)

 

Additional vocals: Pamela MacKenzie, Jenina MacGillivray, Orson Welles, the capcom and crew of the Apollo 10 mission, and a selection of some of the greatest birds of Australia, including the Laughing Kookaburra, Willie Wagtail, Australian Magpie, Eastern Rosella, and Sulphur-crested Cockatoo.

 

All songs by Mathias Kom, with Ariel Sharratt and Jake Nicoll (tracks 2, 3, 4, 7, 9), Maria Peddle (2, 3, 7, 8, 9), Steven Lambke (4, 11), and Carlie Howell (6). All songs © 2021/2024 SOCAN / All rights reserved.

 

We recorded most of this at the Souris Show Hall and the Fairfield Social Club in Epekwitk / PEI in 2023 and 2024, with additional recording at Vessel Studios in Tottenham Hale, Studio J in St. John’s, and José’s studio in Toronto. Carlie and Steve recorded their bass and guitar parts at their own homes in Iris and the Bickerton Autonomous Zone, respectively. ‘Celebrities in Cemeteries’ and ‘What Does It Do and How Does It Work’ were mixed by José; everything else was mixed by Jake. The album was mastered by Norman Nitzsche at Mokik in Berlin. Ariel Sharratt made the album art with her hands.

19.04   St. John’s, NL
23.04  Kiel DE
24.04  Aalborg DK
26.04  Bremen DE
27.04  Bremen DE
28.04  Utrecht NL
29.04  Amsterdam NL
30.04  Haldern DE
01.05  Cologne DE
02.05  Weikersheim DE
03.05  Schorndorf DE
04.05  Munich DE
08.05  Ancona IT
09.05  Pescara IT
10.05  Vicenza IT
13.05  Vienna AT
14.05  Brno CZ
15.05  Prague CZ
16.05  Sulzbach-Rosenberg DE
17.05  Dresden DE
18.05  Berlin DE
19.05  Hamburg DE
12.06  Picton, ON
14.06  Peterborough, ON

UK Tour Dates Announcing March 10, 2025.

Praise for Garbage Island (2022)

  "...funny, sardonic, and literate. Add in a new-wavey, Loaded-era VUsensibility, and it's impossible not to be swayed by these acerbically funny story songs."  
- MOJO MAGAZINE


"...super literate and fantastically droll, over backings that range from bubbling synth pop and acoustic folk to rattly punk and even a spot of semi-calypso. Silver Jews and Jeffrey Lewis spring to mind on the terrific "Birdwatching"; "Bird Queen of Garbage Island" sounds like a glorious revival of Tom Tom Club."
- UNCUT MAGAZINE

9/10 "Maybe The Burning Hell won’t be for everyone – I don’t think they’d even want to be for everyone – but if you like brilliant, thought-provoking lyrics, superb musicianship and killer tunes, you know what… you might just love this too."
-AMERICANA UK
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