riffage
 

not really digging that one.

I think it's great.  Verses of Violence  is one of the best songs they've written.

Read this about the album title


The album title - and the song of the same name - is drawn entirely from an event the frontman experienced in his home state of West Virginia in 2016, "The Seventeen Year Cicada" cycle. "It's a type of locust that lies dormant underground for sixteen years, only to emerge in the seventeenth year, and it then lives for three months above ground to morph, mate, give birth and die. We had a swarm of roughly 1,000 cicada in my front yard underneath a small tree. My eight-year-old daughter, my pregnant-at-the-time girlfriend and I spent the whole season catching and studying them. It was a beautiful experience." While looking for potential album titles, Ojeda's girlfriend playfully suggested The Cicada Tree, and while initially dismissing this as a joke he soon had an epiphany. "Byzantine was coming up on its seventeenth year of existence and, just like the cicada, we spent the last sixteen years underground. So, 'The Cicada Tree' is a metaphor for the lifespan of Byzantine."