Job For A Cowboy announce new album “Moon Healer”, release single “The Forever Rot”

Technical death metallers Job For A Cowboy have just released a new single, “The Forever Rot“. That outing comes along with the official announcement of the release of their fifth studio album, due out on February 23, titled “Moon Healer“. The effort was produced by Jason Suecof (The Black Dahlia Murder, Deicide), and features drummer Navene Koperweis (Entheos), with Mike Caputo handling the live percussion duties.

Vocalist Jonny Davy spoke of the band’s prolonged hiatus, which ended earlier this year:

I had to take a step back in the band for family. It was the catalyst that eventually created a fork in the road for all of us. We all drifted into our separate paths. Fatherhood, additional music projects, academic degrees, and careers outside the band took priority and life’s focus.

He also spoke of the new record:

The evolution of our sound has become a big part of the band. As we mature as musicians, our tastes and interests naturally expand. With age comes more experience and ideas that we wouldn’t have considered in our earlier years.

As most bands have at one point or another found themselves in the situation of having to meet strict deadlines, this was not the case for ‘Moon Healer‘. We started laying the groundwork for this album in 2018. Being as busy as we were in life, we managed to slowly chip away. This slow pace gave us significantly more time to analyze and dissect what we were doing, which in turn helped make a better album.

The upcoming album is linked to the band’s previous one, “Sun Eater“ (2014). Davy says:

‘Sun Eater‘ was an arrangement of melodies inspired by a close friend of the band who lost touch with reality due to excessive hard drug use. This person was predisposed or was already experiencing symptoms of bipolar disorder and/or schizophrenia. They believed the drugs were providing them with eye-opening epiphanies. They believed that the drugs allowed them to cross into a reality closer to God. Likewise, they didn’t have the self-awareness that they were falling further down the depths of their own mental illness. The songs reflected the thoughts, ideas, and situations this person encountered.

The concepts in ‘Moon Healer‘ follow someone attempting to explore a different human existence. They considered themselves a pseudo-alchemist. They obsessed over esoteric methods to access altered states of consciousness through various pathways, including a focus on the pineal gland, a small endocrine gland within the center of the brain is believed to potentially play a role in entheogenic experiences. They cooked mind-altering consumables. But contrary to what others viewed as their descent into delusion, they were under the belief that they were unlocking the gateway to some form of profound enlightenment.

You can check out the new single below: