[cover image by Cristina Alvarez]
Dreams of Consciousness: The last time Pylar was on Dreams of Consciousness was in 2023, when your previous album Límyte was about to be released. What have you been up to since then?
While it might seem like a quiet period with no releases, it has actually been an insanely prolific and intense chapter for us. Over the last few years, we have been writing and recording two new albums for PYLAR. The project was originally conceived as a double album, though we always knew they would be released separately.
The material for both was composed simultaneously, managing about eighty minutes of music with a highly varied approach across the tracks. Both albums were recorded, mixed, and mastered in just two days, marking one of the most grueling efforts we have ever pulled off in the studio.
Parallel to this process, the members of PYLAR began working on a new endeavor: Ancestros (@ancestrosmetal). This is a project where PYLAR has essentially mutated, absorbing musicians from various other bands—growing to over 15 members—to forge an extreme metal entity with a massive experimental mindset.
Ancestros has a distinct sound from PYLAR, yet multiple threads connect them since all of us play in it. It possesses an originality that some have already described as revolutionary.
We started working on material for three albums, which were recorded in 2025 and will be released in the near future.
To sum it up: Between 2023 and 2025, the members of PYLAR have written and recorded a total of five albums.
DoC: You have a new album that came out on July 10th called Delyrio. What can you tell me about this album? How would you compare the music of Delyrio to your previous releases?
The history of PYLAR can be broken down into a few distinct eras.
Our debut album laid the groundwork for the entire project, introducing basically all the elements that we would explore down the road.
Then came a first trilogy of albums heavily influenced by progressive and psychedelic music from the Sixties onward, drawing heavily from Krautrock.
This was followed by a second trilogy where our perspective shifted toward experimenting with speculative composition techniques drawn from the most avant-garde extreme metal (Deathspell Omega, Portal, Teitanblood, Blut aus Nord…).
And finally, our current era spans two albums where we have focused on revitalizing the sonic language of extreme, experimental doom and drone, keeping a close eye on bands like Swans, Oranssi Pazuzu, and, naturally, Sunn O))).
Delyrio stands as the first installment of this final diptych.
DoC: Your previous three albums were part of your "cosmic horror" cycle. Does this continue any of the concepts of the previous cycle, or is it the start of a completely new one?
It is a new cycle, though it’s not a clean break from the past; rather, we are developing the consequences of it.
With Delyrio, we immersed ourselves obsessively in certain concepts that had already begun to infect PYLAR’s worldview during the previous cycle. The conceptual and terminological tide surrounding the experimental philosophy of Speculative Realism plunged us into altered states of consciousness that ultimately led to delirium.
Composing music and writing lyrics that reflected a mind breaking through to the Outside—confronting sheer irrationality and madness—proved to be an incredibly fertile source of inspiration.
The techniques we used were unleashed without boundaries. Whichever idea surpassed the previous one in sheer insanity was the one we adopted. Lucid delirium has been our compass on this mental journey into the beyond.
DoC: You collaborated once again with Francisco Jota-Pérez on the lyrics of the album. Can you tell me about the themes for Delyrio? What is the overall concept for this album cycle?
Francisco was the obvious choice. He had already collaborated with PYLAR and was well-acquainted with our working methods. Moreover, he is one of the leading voices in our country when it comes to experimental thought and avant-garde writing, and someone who deeply understands the philosophical elements we’ve been utilizing for years.
As soon as we explained the vision for Delyrio, he wrote a text for it, fully aware that his words would be subjected to mutations, butchered, and reassembled in a slaughterhouse guided by pure, irrational poetic intuition. It was a remarkably stimulating process.
DoC: Your past albums were influenced by writers such as Reza Negarestani, H.P. Lovecraft, Quentin Meillassoux, and Alan Moore, as well as the philosophy of speculative realism. What writers/philosophers/concepts inspired you this time?
To our previous influences, we have to add Nick Land, Amy Ireland, Deleuze and Guattari, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Ligotti, Mircea Cărtărescu, László Krasznahorkai, Jorge Luis Borges, David Foster Wallace, Roberto Bolaño … We’ve incorporated many literary authors this time around, as their fiction carried just as much weight—if not more—than purely philosophical texts.
The narrative techniques used by these writers inspired a wide array of sonic, formal, and textural experiments. The foremost among them was the rhizome. Following an obsessive reading of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, certain mental mechanisms and modes of thinking hijacked and infected our usual creative processes.
To that, you can add Cărtărescu’s absolutely hallucinatory style and the overlaying of simultaneous planes in search of an almost unbearable textural density... Krasznahorkai’s continuous, infinite sentences that stretch out like volcanic flow, carving their path in an exhausting, inevitable process... Ligotti’s atmospheric, foggy, yet surgical prose... And, of course, the ever-present works of Spengler and Negarestani, whose multiple re-readings clear up nothing, but instead plunge you into a bottomless spiral of madness.
The unpredictable became an obsession. We wanted to compose in a way where the tracks took over the process and achieved their own autonomy—where their evolution no longer depended on us, spreading uncontrollably like a rhizome in all directions, into unfathomable and unthought-of depths.
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| photo by Cristina Alvarez |
DoC: It's common for Pylar to use a lot of unusual (for metal) instrumentation, like violins and horns. What additional instruments or collaborators did you have on Delyrio?
Salazar’s Law states that the exceptional must be the norm. We have applied that philosophy to every single facet of PYLAR, and our instrumentation was no exception.
The timbral poverty of 21st-century metal as a whole has been a very sad thing to witness. The lack of imagination and the homogenization of tone on most modern albums has made us even more combative in this regard.
From the very beginning, we wanted PYLAR to possess an infinite variety of timbres. Each song dictated, by its very nature, which sounds needed to belong to it. The French horn and the violin have been foundational elements that transformed and defined our sound—largely because they are frequently subjected to such savage processing that they become unrecognizable. This is a method we’ve actually applied to every instrument at one point or another.
You often read that Lovecraft overused adjectives and connotative language in his prose, but that is precisely what fascinates us about him and what we wanted to translate into PYLAR’s sound: an inexhaustible palette of colors boasting an almost overwhelming richness.
DoC: How much of the music on the album was improvised in the studio, and how much was written/arranged beforehand? Is there anything about this album that surprised you when you were finished recording?
The amount of improvisation varies on each track, but the ratio is remarkably high by metal standards. We use preset frameworks that act as guideposts, and the instruments improvise around them most of the time. Except for the riff-based guitar parts, where we stick to a tighter structure, we leave everything else wide open—different every single time, both in duration and in performance nuances.
The vocals were tracked on the first take, as were most of the instrumental foundations. The energy that inhabits an initial performance is incredibly difficult to capture again on subsequent tries, and we’ve been recording this way for years. Most of our studio time is actually dedicated to textural overdubs and mixing.
Through this approach, the unpredictable takes ownership of the record. Every musician knows they only get one shot, and they have to play that take like their life depends on it.
DoC: Where did you record this album? Did you record your parts live together, or did you track the instruments separately? What did you want your producer Raúl Pérez (aka "The Alchemical Master") to bring to the finished sound/production of the album?
The album was tracked at La Mina in Andalusia. Raúl Pérez has recorded every single PYLAR album, and his involvement has grown deeper with each release, to the point where he functions as an extra member of the band in the studio.
We always ask him to push our music further with any ideas that steer clear of standard metal tropes. His intuition and input have contributed immensely to every track. We also place a massive amount of trust in his mixing style; he knows exactly how we want the band to sound without falling back on traditional rock/metal sonic hierarchies. We want an orchestral sound, and he knows exactly how to achieve it.
We tracked everything live—a core take onto which multiple overdubs were added later. However, we recorded without a click track, allowing each song and section to breathe naturally, responding to the raw energy of the performance in that exact moment.
DoC: The last time you were on DoC, your line-up had just expanded to a trio with the addition of Mesagret, your bassist. Who is in the band now? How did the new collaborators become involved with Pylar?
For this record, the band recorded the core tracks as a quartet. Each of us plays multiple instruments during tracking or during the subsequent overdub sessions, so everything ends up sounding incredibly dense.
As for the vocals, both singers on this album were collaborating with us for the first time. They adapted beautifully to our studio workflow. The album was written almost entirely as an instrumental piece, so it was genuinely thrilling to see how the vocals completely seized control of the tracks once they entered the picture.
The duel between the two singers, with their contrasting styles, acted as a spectacular creative engine. It gave the tracks a whole new dimension, bringing unexpected layers of complexity and brutality to the forefront.
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| photo by Cristina Alvarez |
DoC: What's next for Ancestros/PYLAR?
We have another completed album that will see the light of day in the near future. Beyond that, we have an enormous vault of recorded archival material that we want to put out. It documents the long, winding process of how each album was written, including abandoned projects that never made it to the formal studio stage, experimental improvisations, and more. We will start rolling this material out next year.
Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, PYLAR has mutated into Ancestros (@ancestrosmetal), a speculative metal hyper-group where we perform alongside numerous other musicians. We are utilizing unprecedented studio techniques designed to push our musical vision into entirely uncharted territories within extreme music.
Ancestros on IG
Pylar on Facebook
Pylar on Bandcamp
Pylar on IG
pylartheband.blogspot.com
Delyrio on Bandcamp [through Cavsas/Cyclic Law]
Delyrio on CD/Vinyl [through the Cavsas/Cyclic Law webstore]
To Know, To Dare, To Will:
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