Bestial Mouths have maintained a remarkably consistent aesthetic throughout their career, constructing a world in which sound and imagery feel inseparable. Their visual language remains haunting and unmistakable, yet never static, while their musical vision continues to progress like a source that never runs dry.
Their forthcoming album, DEAD LINES (lÃneas muertes), confronts the pain, political hopelessness and erosion of human rights that have defined recent years. Written by frontwoman Lynette Cerezo alongside Brant Showers (∆AIMON, Sølve), and produced by Zola Jesus collaborator Alex DeGroot, the record exists in a condition of continual tension between collapse and explosion. It targets systems built to erase, pacify and divide, while resisting total nihilism through empathy, solidarity and defiance.
Destroy//Exist premieres CONJURE, together with its haunting accompanying video. The track channels the album’s underlying pressure into a ritualistic surge, summoning strength from frustration and turning collective anguish into something confrontational. Both the song and its imagery remain rooted in the band’s established universe while revealing another stage in its ongoing evolution.
Darkness has rarely looked this exquisite or sounded this masterful. Rejoice!
DEAD LINES (lÃneas muertes) arrives September 4th, 2026, through Negative Gain Productions.
Brant's Falling Forever mix of CONJURE is released along with the single. Brant comments: "In producing DEAD LINES (lineas muertes), we made a conscious decision to maintain a very direct and to the-point approach throughout, to excise any 'theatrics' in favor of an impactful and unambiguous intention. To that end, with the Forever Falling mix of CONJURE, we used the opportunity to explore more space and atmosphere than was appropriate for the album proper; to give it a more doom and lamentful treatment, showcasing the weight and strength of the song from an alternate perspective."
An interview with Lynette Cerezo and Brant Showers on the band's new material follows.
DEAD LINES (lineas muertes) confronts the feeling of being trapped within systems designed to erase and pacify. What experiences made this tension the central force behind the album?
Lynette: Being American sure helps! The album’s driving tension is rooted in the systemic violence that is the foundational architecture of the state. The HD polarizing political climate and visible hatred of the Trump era has exposed the deep-seated historical rot that has marginalized vulnerable communities for generations. Immigration crackdowns, ICE interventions, the erasure of queer, trans, and Black and Brown bodies should be enough for anyone to turn their art into an act of resistance against a landscape hell-bent on destroying human agency.
The title suggests boundaries, severed connections and points beyond which something cannot continue. What does DEAD LINES mean to you?
Lynette: The title DEAD LINES references the invisible yet hyper-rigid boundaries that govern and constrict our behavior and connection, and the literal borders where crossing an arbitrary line can mean detention or death. These lines are the dead ends engineered by a hostile system — points where empathy ceases, where human value is discarded.
It’s also a joke about bandmates who don’t meet recording deadlines…
Why did you choose to accompany the English title with the Spanish lineas muertes? Does the phrase carry a different emotional or political weight in Spanish?
Lynette: It’s a direct nod to my Puerto Rican lineage, which as I get older I feel a stronger connection to, and to the people I see constrained by lineas muertes. It just slaps harder and feels a lot more emotional and personal than the English version as well. It immediately makes you think of land borders and the literal life-or-death lines people in our communities have to walk daily just to survive. It takes out the abstract and signals who this album is for.
It carries another connection as well, to the underground Spanish community, folks that follow us and who we follow. Spain, Mexico, these are my favorite places to play, and a lot of them don’t always realize at first, hey, I’m your people too, so I think that’s also why I did it.
Brant describes the record as a “communal crying spell.” How did you transform collective fear and exhaustion into something that still feels confrontational and empowering?
Lynette: I ask myself that every time I wake up. It’s like that Carnegie Hall joke: “Prrrrr-actice!”
Brant: The exhaustion is very real. These are groups that often don’t have the privilege to even be tired, so our intention is to make it known they aren’t carrying the weight alone. All of us in Bestial Mouths are actively involved in protests and community advocacy groups. It’s always been about backing up our words with direct action and lifting up the sword. Much of this album is observing and taking aim at the structures that enslave and divide us, and to take back our claws. Our exhaustion is intentional and being weaponized against us to demoralize and destroy our rights to happiness.
The album rejects pure nihilism and instead presents empathy as a form of resistance. In a climate increasingly shaped by cruelty and division, can empathy become a genuinely radical act?
Brant: In these times choosing joy is rebellion, choosing empathy is rebellion.
Lynette: Empathy is the most radical act! Look at the phone zombies ignoring each other in public. When you look at the sheer number of systemic variables designed to keep us apart and constantly distracted, choosing to care is straight-up rebellion. Which is quite tragic! There’s nothing more threatening to a cruel system than recognizing the humanity in others and actively giving a shit about it.
Alex DeGroot has once again handled production. How has your creative relationship evolved, and what did he bring to DEAD LINES that distinguishes it from your previous work?
Lynette: We love what Alex has done in the past with us. He really understands Bestial Mouths, and even though it’s a ‘heavy’ album I still want people to dance, to move and connect with it. His mixing made the melodies stand out beautifully.
CONJURE is our first entrance into the new album and its concept. What exactly is being summoned in the song; strength, memory, rage or something less easily defined?
Lynette: The driving force behind CONJURE is its repetition: saying you’re not going to do something, saying it over and over, and then doing it anyway. It’s always going to be the last time, this cyclical pain you keep repeating, because why be alive otherwise?
The album artwork and video retain the haunting aesthetic associated with Bestial Mouths. How do you keep that visual identity recognizably yours without allowing it to become merely decorative or familiar?
Lynette: Well, it’s mine! Collaboration is also really key; luckily, having a fashion background plus being a West Coast weirdo means I know a lot of other weirdos in film and style, with amazing wardrobes and cool ideas. Tas Limur shot the images for the album, and he’s brilliant. I always love working with him and his wife Michaela.
The record is dedicated to those who understand the desperation that leads to “burning everything down.” Where do you draw the line between destruction as an understandable response and destruction as another mechanism of control?
Brant: The response to burning everything down around you is directly tied to the chaos and political discord that power structures utilize to maintain coercion and fear. It would be amazing if we could divorce the two and recognize what tools and weapons we have at our disposal, the leverage we hold as a mass over oppression, but as a society we’re far from that tier on the pyramid of needs. Right now it’s the empathy of a shared frustration that needs to be mobilized into action. We support and respect that anger wholeheartedly, and we recognize that history bears the importance and effectiveness of direct action, and sometimes that looks like violence. Which we’re not advocating for!
Lynette: But which we’re not not advocating for.
Top two photos by Tas Limur
All other photos by Ted Titus
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