Utah doom crushers Hibernaut return with a harrowing new video for ‘Mark of Shame,’ premiering today at Decibel. The track appears on the band’s upcoming split LP with Arizona extreme outfit Face Pulp, due March 6 via What’s Left Records.
Built on towering riffs and a suffocating sense of weight, ‘Mark of Shame’ is one of Hibernaut’s most emotionally direct statements to date. Rather than leaning on abstraction, the song confronts the cyclical nature of child abuse and domestic violence—how unresolved trauma calcifies into guilt and shame, then mutates into rage, addiction, and repetition. It’s a song about learned behavior and inherited damage, and the difficulty of breaking free from patterns that feel inescapable.
“The song Mark of Shame is about the cyclical nature of child abuse and domestic violence,” explains guitarist and vocalist Dave Jones. “From the angry parent that is unable to reconcile their own feelings of inadequacy and lash out when their authority is challenged, to the child who is conditioned to the behavior. The guilt and shame that accompany it become the same rage that was directed toward themselves.”
That emotional weight carries directly into the accompanying video, edited by Jones himself. The visual blends footage from a shared live show with Face Pulp—members of both bands appear throughout—with deeply unsettling archival material sourced from a 1950s mental hospital. Masked figures and clinical detachment heighten the sense of psychological confinement, reinforcing the song’s themes of internalized trauma and loss of agency.
“In all honesty it was a real bummer to work on because of the subject matter,” Jones admits. “But art is supposed to make you feel something, right?” The video offers no easy resolution—only confrontation—mirroring the reality that without addressing mental health, these cycles too often repeat.
Formed in Salt Lake City in 2021 by members of SubRosa and Dwellers, Hibernaut have steadily carved their own lane within modern doom, blending crushing heaviness with psychedelic textures and progressive dynamics. Their debut Ingress reached #15 on the Doom Charts in 2023, while last year’s Obsidian Eye marked a significant leap forward, debuting at #7. The upcoming split LP continues that trajectory, pairing Hibernaut’s immersive weight with Face Pulp’s hardcore- and grind-rooted aggression.
‘Mark of Shame’ may be difficult by design, but it’s also purposeful. Hibernaut use volume, pacing, and discomfort as tools—not to shock, but to force a reckoning with cycles that too often remain unspoken.
Watch the video for ‘Mark of Shame’ below.
The post Video Premiere: Hibernaut – ‘Mark of Shame’ appeared first on Decibel Magazine.