Finally the veil on “The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR”, the highly anticipated new Orphaned Land album, is lifted! The release of the bands’ fourth studio album is set for January 25th 2010 in Europe, January 27th in Japan and February 9th in the USA.

As communicated before, the album is mixed by Steven Wilson who also plays keyboards on it. According to Century Media: “The Never Ending Way Of ORwarriOR turns out to be a sophisticated concept album taking ORPHANED LAND’s unique brand of exotic, heavy music to soaring new heights in terms of complexity and catchiness. It is an audible manifest that the time has come for Middle Eastern metal to take over!”

Simultaneous with the news of a release date, we also get a new promo picture of the band which is… striking, to say the least. This is what Kobi has to say about it:
“As people that were born into the tragedy of our region, we have always been devoted to creating harmony between conflicts, a musical heaven on earth, a tango between God & Satan. Even in the album’s artwork we combined Hebrew and Arabic, regardless of the fight between Jews and Muslims. I found a Jordanian guy, specialized in calligraphic artwork. He took letters from Hebrew and Arabic and moulded them in his art to create a symbol of peace. Same goes for our band photo, where we portrayed a synergy between the three monotheistic religions, that believe in the same God and yet, ridiculously have been killing each other for centuries “in the name of God” and turned the holy land into an orphaned land. Naturally we continued this idea of union on a musical level as well and the result is as always crazy, it’s a miracle– in our concerts: our Jewish fans sing in Arabic and our Muslim fans sing in Hebrew, brave friendships have spawned and our Middle Eastern metal music destroys all this political witchcraft we have been trapped in for so long. This is a musical journey of hope in lands of war, creating heaven on earth, building a new Jerusalem.”

Then Century Media goes on to say: “Israel’s ORPHANED LAND is probably the only band from this country that has managed to succeed at building up a huge following among Muslims and Arabian people. These fans communicate freely via the band’s social networking pages, some of them even proudly bearing ORPHANED LAND tattoos, even though that puts them at huge risk in their home countries! The African musician Fela Kuti once said: “music is the weapon of the future” – ORPHANED LAND is the living proof of that!”

This promises quite something for the album! It seems that Orphaned Land are striking far and wide out of the metal scene with the statements they are making with this album. Then to top it all off, there is the new bandlogo. A beautiful and very symbolic piece of art that clearly underlines the viewpoint of the band.

Go to the Orphaned Land website to read more!

Read the news on the Century Media website.

Watch an exclusive interview we had with Kobi Farhi about ORwarriOR in August 2009.