Metal
Self-released · 8 October 2026
“Lady of Slaughter”, the fifth track, borrows one of the documented epithets of Sekhmet, the lion-headed Egyptian goddess the old texts also call mistress of dread. The record gives her a voice of her own: in the credits Ela Kuebler is listed as “Sekhmet spoken words” and as the source of the growls, so the song that watches the Exodus from the pursuing army has a deity for a narrator. The album title plays on both readings, since the lions leaving the den can be the ones fleeing or the ones going out to hunt.
Eighteen years have passed since the first chapter. “Exodus: Slaves for Life” came out in June 2008 on Inside Out Music and ended with the ten plagues; this second one starts from the exile and closes at “Foothills of Mount Sinai”, with the ninth track, “Wooden Staff part II”, tied by its title to the seventh of the debut. Erez Yohanan is still the whole project: drums, percussion, programming, vocals, composition and production. Markus Teske mixes and masters again at his Bazement Studio and Mattias Norén signs the cover again, which are the two trades carried over from that record.
The casting is the real change. Lukky Sparxx and Jessica Mercy share the lead vocals, Phillip Freeman narrates, Kobi Farhi (Orphaned Land) returns with vocals and spoken words, Yadin Moyal handles guitars and bass, Sharon Cohen brings the oriental violins and woodwinds and Gil Tzemach the oud. “Pathway to the Promised Land” runs past ten minutes and is the longest of the ten; “Miriam” is sung by Jessica Mercy, and Angry Metal Guy describes it as the ballad where a people dreams of a new home.
There is a paradox in the credit list. Mats Levén, who sang the whole of the debut, appears here only on backing vocals; Yuval Kramer and Hanan Avramovich, the other two members of the 2008 Amaseffer, show up as “additional guitars”. The chapter that has to push the story forward is therefore the one that least resembles the group that began it, and the two voices carrying it are the two that arrive new. And for a record that stakes its meaning on narration, in English and in Hebrew, the text is published nowhere: the band’s Bandcamp page carries no credits and no lyrics, and the list of the eighteen people playing on it can only be found in the press release. Yohanan announced this second chapter for July and it came out on 8 October, self-released after a debut on an international label: the “Slaves for Life” page on the band’s Bandcamp still gives it as due in July 2026.
Rating: 7.9/10
Text by Roger Estivill