premature burial

Premature burial, as an idea, evolved from Joshua Heinrich's forays into experimental electronic music in college and studies of musique concrete and musique electronique. Initially emerging from the track "exctinction", an experimental dark soundscape composed and recorded in 1999 for a live group performance piece at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the on-again-off-again project eventually took on a new duality that blended processed orchestral instrumentation and sampling techniques with more tongue-in-cheek song-oriented material. The result was premature burial's debut album, flowers for the dead, with the band's somewhat dark name actually being an inside joke referring to the number of times the project was abandoned, reworked, and restarted.

With premature burial's second album, however, the project took on a life of its own along with a more serious and cohesive concept-driven style and instrumental sound that combined ambient, classical, industrial, rock, and world music elements. Centered around ideas including spirituality, searching for identity, historical events, and persecution, ritual became premature burial's most popular album and produced the cult hit "sacrifice", which has since appeared in film.

In 2002, flowers for the dead and ritual were reissued with additional artwork and bonus tracks (including material from Heinrich's score to the 2001 horror film The Strange). The reissues were followed by premature burial's third album, ruins, a second epic concept album that this time concentrated on violence and war, following civilization from the deaths of past cultures to the extinction of mankind in a bleak nuclear winter. While the melodic/orchestral elements of ritual were still firmly in place, ruins delved further into industrial/noise territory, portraying the album's later thematic content with relentless distorted percussion and bleak processed ambient noise as the world fell into disarray and violence.

In 2003, Heinrich began work on a fourth premature burial album, nightfall, dealing with themes of control, politics, and illusions of freedom, but the album was abandoned shortly into recording due to feelings that the new album, sonically, wasn't pushing the same boundaries as the previous two premature burial albums.

In 2011, a tenth anniversary reissue of ritual was released with previously unreleased bonus tracks along with reissues of ruins and flowers for the dead, all remastered from the original multitrack recordings. In 2015, the project was resurrected to record a track, "signal to noise to signal", for an experimental compilation on Silber Records. The following year, premature burial recorded and released a new EP, Factions (alternately stylized "f/a/c/t/i/o/n/s"), also on Silber Records, followed by several one-off tracks and compilation appearances as work slowly began on a new album.

In 2023, Premature Burial emerged with a new album, Chronic, a concept album about chronic illness that saw the project move in new sonic directions while still maintaining its original DNA. The album was released on Autumnal Release, while a 5-song companion EP, Mortality, was released a week earlier on Silber Records.