Southern California deathcore titans Carnifex have announced their new album, More Than Misery, set for release on November 6th via Sumerian Records. The announcement comes with the album’s title track and its official music video.
Survival has always been the live wire running through vocalist Scott Ian Lewis’s lyrics. On earlier Carnifex records, he wrote while still locked inside the experiences he was trying to endure and process. More Than Misery changes that perspective. For the first time, Lewis is writing after the act of surviving.
That perspective gives the album title its deliberate double meaning. Heard one way, “more than misery” suggests something even worse waiting beyond the darkness. Here, it becomes an assertion that a person’s life is larger than the misery it contains.
The title track brings that idea into brutal focus. Its lyrics descend through burning obsession, isolation and self-loathing, caught in the pull of poison and a cycle of suffering that feels impossible to break. Then the grip loosens. The face fades, the mask tears away and the song arrives at the album’s hard-won thesis: life will always be more than misery.
Speaking on the album and its title track, Lewis shares: “More Than Misery is about what happens when suffering becomes more than something you endure; it becomes what changes you. This is Carnifex at our most honest and unapologetically brutal”.
Musically, Carnifex approached More Than Misery with the goal of combining their original 2005 musicality with the tools now available in 2026. The album brings together the physical directness of first-wave deathcore, the band’s death-metal foundations, the symphonic atmosphere developed across their later records, and the decision to focus on guitars remaining the primary musical voice, with orchestration used to deepen their impact. Every song was built with the live room in mind, from pit and circle-pit movement to whether the five musicians could carry each part convincingly onstage.
The record was tracked in Tennessee with Zach Householder of Whitechapel and mixed by Jeff Dunne, bringing an entirely new production team into the band’s creative process.
More Than Misery is Carnifex‘s first full-length album for Sumerian Records. Pre-order it here. The partnership was introduced in May with the release of “Roses & Rotting Corpses”, opening a campaign that now reveals its emotional and musical centre.
Twenty-one years after helping shape deathcore’s first wave, Carnifex have made a record that turns survival from a recurring subject into a changed point of view. More Than Misery carries the darkness that has always defined the band, now with the clarity of five musicians who know exactly what survived it.
Carnifex will spend the months surrounding the album’s release on the road across North America, the UK and Europe. The band will first join All Shall Perish for The Price of Existence 20th anniversary tour before a run of headline dates, an appearance at Furnace Fest and a 20-date European co-headline tour with Despised Icon and Suffocation. The European run crosses the November 6th release of More Than Misery, with Carnifex performing in Sheffield, UK on release day. For the full list of upcoming tour dates and further information, check here.
Formed in Fallbrook, California, in 2005 by vocalist Scott Ian Lewis and drummer Shawn Cameron, Carnifex emerged from the collision of death metal, black metal, metalcore, and the physical energy of Southern California’s all-ages hardcore scene. Their early music helped establish the language of deathcore’s first wave, while nine studio albums and twenty-one years of relentless touring have made them one of the genre’s most durable forces.
Across albums including Dead in My Arms, Hell Chose Me, Die Without Hope, Slow Death, World War X, and Necromanteum, Carnifex have expanded their sound through blackened atmosphere, symphonic scale, and an increasingly prominent melodic and lead-guitar presence. Through deathcore’s initial rise, years of backlash and its current resurgence, the band have remained committed to the music they helped shape.
That durability is rooted in the way Carnifex operates. Scott Ian Lewis, Shawn Cameron, Cory Arford, Neal Tiemann, and Fred Calderon function as five equal band members with two decades of friendship behind them. Their relationship with listeners has endured just as long, with fans and band members moving through adulthood together and repeatedly showing one another that neither side is alone.
On More Than Misery, Carnifex brings twenty-one years of hard-earned live instinct to a record written from the far side of survival, built to hit with the same force when they step onstage.
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