There are ambitious concept albums, and then there are albums that feel like somebody has emptied the entire contents of their head onto the table and somehow found a way to turn it all into music.
Annihilus Mundi’s forthcoming second full-length, The Dead Sea Scrolls, definitely leans towards the latter.
Across 77 minutes and thirteen tracks, composer, multi-instrumentalist and Annihilus Mundi mastermind Daniel Saillant pulls together progressive and death metal, shoegaze, full orchestration, electronics, piano, harpsichord, jazzier passages, crushing riffs and even bassoon. Running beneath all of that is an intensely personal exploration of anxiety, religion, isolation, trauma, power and human connection, filtered through the characters and imagery of Neon Genesis Evangelion and The End of Evangelion.
It is huge, strange, challenging and, after spending plenty of time with the record myself, one hell of a journey from start to finish.
Ahead of the album’s November 6 release, I caught up with Daniel to go right back to where his connection with music first began, the rebirth of Annihilus Mundi as a live band, his love of anime, writing during the uncertainty of 2020 and why such a dark record ultimately needed to leave us with something resembling hope.
FROM TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA TO METALLICA
Before getting anywhere near Annihilus Mundi, I wanted to take Daniel right back to that earliest core musical memory, the point where music stopped simply existing in the background and became something that stayed with him.
For Daniel, several of those earliest memories revolve around Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
His mother owned Christmas Eve and Other Stories, and once Thanksgiving had passed, the album became part of the soundtrack to the Saillant household.
“My mom had the Christmas Eve and Other Stories CD,” Daniel recalled. “Every year after Thanksgiving, only after Thanksgiving, not before. We’re not a Christmas music before Thanksgiving household in Rhode Island.”
One particular piece became an obsession.
“I was apparently obsessed with it even before I can remember being obsessed with it,” he laughed, remembering repeatedly asking his mother to find “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” while having absolutely no idea which track number it actually was.
“I kept asking my mom, ‘Can you skip to track whatever?’ And I kept forgetting what track number it was, so I kept asking her to skip to track two, track six, track eight, whatever. I could never get it right.”
Trans-Siberian Orchestra would also become Daniel’s first concert, cementing something that makes perfect sense when looking at Annihilus Mundi today. The collision of heavy music and orchestration wasn’t something he discovered later in life. It was there almost from the beginning.
Another important doorway arrived through his mum’s collection.
A mixtape introduced ten-year-old Daniel to Metallica through “Hero of the Day.” Then, while walking through Walmart in 2008, he spotted a new Metallica record and reasonably assumed it would sound something like the song he already knew.
That album was Death Magnetic.
It did not sound like “Hero of the Day.”
At all.
Daniel laughed while telling the story, but that unexpected jump became another significant point on the road towards heavy music.
And for anyone ready to start the usual Metallica argument, Daniel is having none of it.
“I don’t think Metallica has any bad albums,” he said. “I even defend St. Anger. I don’t care, I like it.”
Music is subjective, legends. Play what grabs you and crank the fucker loud.
BRINGING ANNIHILUS MUNDI BACK TO LIFE
Annihilus Mundi began as Daniel’s creative world, largely existing as a solo project without any certainty that it would ever become something people around the world would eventually hear.
Then came 2020.
Daniel graduated college into a world turned upside down by the COVID pandemic. The expected transition into adulthood suddenly became far less straightforward.
“I’ve just graduated, or I’m graduating college,” he remembered thinking. “I should be going out into a job. I should be getting an apartment. I should be starting my life. And instead, here we are just in my childhood bedroom not knowing if the world is ever going to be the same.”
In the years that followed, Daniel moved through various musical projects before becoming firmly established within the Boston-area scenes surrounding Ice Giant and Perennial Quest.
He loved being part of those bands, but another thought kept creeping back in.
“I’m having a great time,” he said, “but I would love, because these are other people’s bands fundamentally, there’s also this small aspect to it where it’s like, ‘You know what? I wish I could just do it.’”
Annihilus Mundi was still sitting there.
So in 2024, Daniel finally stopped overthinking it.
“Fuck it. Let’s just bring it back.”
He already had people interested in making it happen live, including guitarists Chris Ramusiewicz and Davy Allen, and the unfinished material that would eventually become The Dead Sea Scrolls had been sitting with him for years.
“I know there are people interested. I really like this music. Everybody that I’ve played this music for likes this music. You know, fuck it. At this point, let’s just do it.”
The bedroom project was becoming a band.
ANIME WAS ALWAYS PART OF THE DNA
Looking at The Dead Sea Scrolls, it would be easy to assume Daniel’s relationship with anime began when he decided to build a record around Neon Genesis Evangelion.
It goes much further back.
The bones of Annihilus Mundi started taking shape around Daniel’s college years, which happened to be around the same period he was properly discovering anime for the first time.
He had seen things like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Transformers, but he hadn’t really approached anime as its own form of storytelling.
Then his friends showed him Fullmetal Alchemist.
“That was the first thing that I ever saw, and it ruined anime forever because it’s incredible and it’s perfect.”
Daniel became fascinated by how deeply animation could explore complicated characters and darker emotional territory.
“I was so completely fascinated by how dark and deep and complicated so many of these shows could be.”
There was also a certain amount of admitting defeat.
For years, Daniel had dismissed anime as something for the “weird kids.”
Then he realised he was one of them.
“I totally was one of those,” he laughed. “I just didn’t want to admit it.”
Anime would become intertwined with the earliest Annihilus Mundi material, with early versions of Grief carrying ideas connected to Fullmetal Alchemist before the debut developed into its eventual concept.
Daniel also remembered rediscovering an even earlier anime memory while watching Studio Ghibli films with friends at college.
He thought he had never seen Spirited Away.
Then one particular scene unlocked something buried away from childhood.
“I had actually seen that movie before, and it was so long ago, and I was so scared of that scene as a kid that I locked it away.”
It is perhaps fitting that someone whose music now deals so heavily with memory, fear and the way experiences remain buried inside us had one of those exact moments triggered by animation.
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS ISN’T AN EVANGELION RETELLING
That brings us into the heart of The Dead Sea Scrolls.
Yes, the album is deeply connected to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Shinji Ikari, Asuka Langley Soryu, Gendo Ikari and the enormous mythology surrounding the series are everywhere.
But Daniel isn’t interested in simply retelling the anime through progressive death metal.
If you want the plot of Evangelion, go watch Evangelion.
Instead, Daniel uses its characters and ideas as mirrors.
“Absolute Terror,” he explained, sits closer to directly examining the characters, but elsewhere things become increasingly personal and stream-of-consciousness.
“A Hedgehog’s Dilemma,” for example, explores the feeling of social disconnection and the masks people put on to exist comfortably among one another.
Daniel described it as feeling surrounded by vultures and having to put on a vulture mask yourself.
“Yeah, I’m one of you, right?”
All while knowing internally that there is still a disconnect.
Other sections move beyond individual psychology and into politics, religion and the systems humanity builds around itself.
That distinction is important.
The Dead Sea Scrolls isn’t really an album about Evangelion.
Evangelion is one of the languages Daniel uses to talk about us.
BUILDING A 77-MINUTE MONSTER
Musically, this thing is fucking enormous.
There are thirteen tracks, recurring motifs, death metal, progressive rock, electronics, acoustic sections, shoegaze textures, full orchestration, piano and harpsichord. Ideas disappear only to turn up later in different contexts, sometimes long after the listener first heard them.
When I asked whether Daniel still approaches something this big like a metal songwriter or whether it becomes more like scoring a film, he leaned towards the latter.
“I think it is probably more on the scoring-the-film side than anything.”
A perfect example is the album opener, “Second Impact (Overture).”
Rather than beginning there and building forward, Daniel wrote it near the end of the process.
Throughout the record’s creation, different riffs and melodies gradually became associated with specific ideas. Those musical pieces would be moved, repeated and reshaped across different songs until a web of recurring motifs developed.
Then Daniel went back and built “Second Impact” from those ideas.
“The goal of it is to show you, okay, these are the ideas, these are the musical motifs, listen for these throughout the record.”
It makes the album something that should reveal more of itself over repeated listens.
This isn’t really a “throw it on shuffle” record.
It wants the full journey.
“KING OF THORNS” AND A WORLD THAT STOPPED
One of the most personal moments on the album comes with “King of Thorns.”
The track mixes melancholic melodies, folk ideas, progressive and jazz-influenced sections, heavy guitars and some genuinely unexpected textures into one of the stranger pieces on an already adventurous record.
Yet underneath all that experimentation is something very real.
The song began in April 2020.
Daniel originally released an early version titled “The Banished One,” written while he was stuck at home during the earliest stages of the COVID pandemic.
“We had just been kicked off of my college campus. I was in my house for like six weeks straight. I didn’t leave.”
Like so many people during that time, Daniel was watching an extraordinary amount of uncertainty unfold through screens while trying to understand what came next.
It also arrived at a particularly strange point in his own life.
He was supposed to be graduating, finding work, moving out and beginning whatever adulthood was meant to look like.
Instead, everything stopped.
“It was a lot of anxieties,” he said. “I should be starting my life. And instead, here we are just in my childhood bedroom not knowing if the world is ever going to be the same.”
Six years later, the distance can make that period feel strangely remote.
“King of Thorns” preserves it.
“All of those anxieties were channelled into that song in the beginning.”
Daniel considers it perhaps the most consistently melancholic song on The Dead Sea Scrolls.
“There are moments when it gets darker and sadder and more intense, but that particular sort of heavy weight emotion, I think definitely the zenith of that is ‘King of Thorns.’”
RELIGION, FEAR AND THE STORIES WE INHERIT
Religion forms another major layer of The Dead Sea Scrolls.
Not merely religious imagery, but belief, fear, inherited doctrine and what happens when religious or political structures are used as tools of control.
Daniel was raised Catholic and was eventually confirmed in the church, but doubts appeared incredibly early.
“One of my earliest childhood memories is from first, second grade,” he explained. “Somebody asked me something, I don’t even remember what it was, honestly, it was church-related, and I remember I said that I don’t even know if I believe in God.”
The idea of original sin and eternal punishment particularly troubled him.
“I remember being so confused by that.”
Those childhood questions remained, but Daniel’s relationship with religion became more analytical as he got older. He later attended Boston College and chose a course examining the Bible from a historical perspective, something he described as “fucking fascinating.”
Rather than pushing him towards belief, it deepened his interest in how religious stories form, change, overlap and are interpreted by later cultures.
That fascination sits throughout The Dead Sea Scrolls.
It also explains why Daniel can be deeply interested in religious mythology and symbolism while remaining personally atheist.
For him, those stories are powerful.
The institutions built around them are another matter entirely.
“Human Instrumentality” eventually takes that conversation further, examining the ways religious and governmental powers can manipulate people, create division and encourage us to view one another as enemies.
But importantly, that isn’t where Daniel wanted to leave us.
FINDING SOMETHING BRIGHT IN THE WRECKAGE
For all its darkness, I never heard The Dead Sea Scrolls as completely hopeless.
The album spends a lot of time inside fear, trauma, isolation, religious anxiety, political manipulation and self-doubt, but its final destination feels different.
That is deliberate.
“Very, very important for the end of that song to feel triumphant,” Daniel told me when we reached “Human Instrumentality.”
He gravitates naturally towards darker art and heavier emotional spaces. Anyone hearing this record will figure that out pretty bloody quickly.
But simply pointing at everything wrong with humanity wasn’t enough.
“It’s so important to me to look at some sort of bright side.”
For Daniel, the final section comes back to something fundamentally human beneath the institutions and divisions built around us.
“As soon as we separate ourselves from that and as soon as we come together as people, we do all have fundamental shared experiences, fundamental shared loves, hates, disdains, emotions and things like that that are universal across the entire human experience.”
That idea gives the end of The Dead Sea Scrolls its purpose.
“It was really important for me to end the album on a hopeful note.”
And that might ultimately be the most important thing buried inside this huge, complicated, strange and often incredibly heavy album.
After 77 minutes of looking at the ways we hurt ourselves and each other, Daniel still believes there is something worth reaching towards.
TAKING ANNIHILUS MUNDI OUT INTO THE WORLD
The next step is getting this monster out of the studio and onto stages.
Annihilus Mundi are preparing an album-release show in Providence, Rhode Island on November 6, the same day The Dead Sea Scrolls arrives.
Daniel also revealed plans are developing for at least two touring runs during 2027, with an early spring run around New England and parts of the US East Coast followed by plans to reach the Midwest later in the year.
Canada is firmly in their sights as well.
“We are imminently planning a return to Canada because we deeply love Canada,” Daniel said. “They’re so wonderful to us. They have such interesting love and respect for weird complicated music up there.”
Weird, complicated music is a pretty fair description of Annihilus Mundi.
But it only tells part of the story.
The Dead Sea Scrolls is huge because Daniel is trying to fit huge ideas inside it. Childhood memories collide with anime, orchestration, religion, uncertainty, philosophy, politics and a pandemic-era song written by a young musician who didn’t know what the world was going to look like when he stepped outside again.
Somehow, all of those pieces eventually find their way towards the same place.
Connection.
Annihilus Mundi’s The Dead Sea Scrolls arrives independently on November 6, 2026, with “King of Thorns” landing ahead of the album on October 7.
Crank this fucker loud, legends.
The neighbours are probably going to want to hear it.
Connect with ANNIHILUS MUNDI:
Bandcamp: https://annihilusmundi.bandcamp.com/music
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/annihilusmundi
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annihilusmundi/
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@annihilusmundi
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/annihilusmundi
Spotify:
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Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/annihilus-mundi/1492843855
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