THY CATAFALQUE, the Hungarian avant-garde metal project of Tamás Kátai, release new single and music video “Cseremisz” (“Cheremis”) today, the third single from XIII: Sárga erdő, the band’s thirteenth album, out November 20th via Season of Mist.
Watch the video for Cseremisz: https://youtu.be/Ik02rKWCVzU
“Cseremisz” is a folk song that never existed. Cheremis is the older name for the Mari, a Finno-Ugric people who live along the Volga and Kama rivers in Eastern Europe, and Hungarian belongs to the same language family. Kátai invented the song as a folk song of that region and built it from traditional instruments and a choir: the Male Choir of Tiszaföldvár, Bálint Bokodi on vocals, Anikó Barna on citera and koboz, Dmitry Karev on accordion, Dario Cei on flute and Árpád Szenti on drums.
The lyrics move across the steppe at night. A steppe-gull soars over the plain, the narrator is the wolf in the reeds and the fox in the meadow, and a heart beats “like hooves on the steppe”. A black ship drifts down the Volga with its soldiers asleep aboard, and only the pounding of hooves is awake in the dark, a headlong flight that somehow feels beautiful. The song closes on a line it repeats and does not soften: “A halál mögöttem száll, utolér” (“Death flies behind me, and overtakes”).
The single follows “Búcsú a piros madártól” and “Tömbök” and sits among the twelve tracks of XIII: Sárga erdő, an album Kátai describes as having no unifying lyrical concept, only the feeling of wandering through the forest of past times. It was recorded at various locations and at Miracle Sound Szeged, with live drums for the first time in the project’s history and thirty-four musicians and vocalists alongside a twenty-voice male choir. The folk and classical instrumentation is used only where a song needs it.
Pre-order & pre-save XIII: Sárga erdő: https://orcd.co/thycatafalquesargaerdo
Thy Catafalque began in Makó, in southeastern Hungary, in 1998, and has been Kátai’s solo-authored vision since Rengeteg in 2011, realised with a rotating cast of guest musicians. A studio-only project for more than two decades, it played live for the first time in 2021 and has since won two Fonogram Awards, Hungary’s equivalent of the Grammy, for Vadak and Alföld. 2025 brought debuts at Hellfest, Rockstadt Extreme and Alcatraz, the project’s first shows in Latin America, and a European headline tour opening at Budapest’s Dürer Kert in March 2026.
XIII: Sárga erdő was produced by Tamás Kátai and recorded at various locations and at Miracle Sound Szeged in Szeged, Hungary. The album was engineered, mixed and mastered by Gábor Vári at Miracle Sound Szeged. Artwork is by Tamás Kátai, with photography by Laszlo Horvath.
Tamás Kátai says:
“Cseremisz means Cheremis and they are a Finno-Ugric people living along the river Volga in Russia. They are an ethnic minority in Mari El Republic and because of the Finno-Urgic roots they are relatives to Hungarian people. We have learned about them in primary school, and they have always been a very distant and mystical people to me. This song is a fictitious folk song from that region that could be connected to recent historical events as well.
We have some traditional instruments like citera and koboz here with accordion and a male choir together with Bálint Bokodi on vocals.”
