Michael Cloud Duguay and Mathias Kom share Closed City’s eponymous new single

Michael Cloud Duguay and Mathias Kom share Closed City‘s eponymous new single

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Closed City arrives on 27th March via Watch That Ends The Night

Michael Cloud Duguay and Mathias Kom expand on their upcoming collaborative album Closed City, releasing its eponymous single ahead of the album’s 27th March release date on Watch That Ends The Night Records.

Serving as the album’s final statement, “Closed City” bookends the project, anchoring its themes of disconnection, isolation, and inward turn. The track centres on the line “We proclaim our home forever closed”, a declaration that frames the record’s imagined world not as a place under siege, but as one that has chosen its own enclosure.

The release also underscores the intermittent creative relationship between Duguay and Kom. Friends and collaborators since the mid-2000s, the two worked closely in the early years of Kom’s project The Burning Hell before losing touch for over a decade. Their reconnection in 2021 led to a renewed creative dialogue, ultimately culminating in Closed City – their first full-length project together.

Built primarily around brass, “Closed City” unfolds as a gradual shift in intent. The opening passages suggest forward motion, with the ensemble moving in broad, measured phrases that imply arrival or possibility. When Kom’s vocals enter, delivered in a restrained, chant-like cadence, the track’s trajectory subtly alters, introducing a more ominous register. Following his final refrain, “We proclaim our home forever closed,” the brass pivots away from its earlier sense of momentum, slipping into increasingly dissonant harmonies. From there, the ensemble ebbs and flows in slow, cinematic arcs, before settling on unresolved brass dissonance. The song and album ends without harmonic resolution, reinforcing Duguay’s stated aim that there be “no closure in a closed place”.

The track also reflects Duguay’s ongoing interest in records shaped by constraint and logistical challenge, a defining principle of Watch That Ends The Night Records, the label he co-operates. As with previous WTETN releases, limitation here is not something to overcome, but something to compose with – an approach that informs both the album’s method and its form.

Speaking on the track, Michael Cloud Duguay said, “I wanted the album bookended with brass pieces, with the finale recontextualising themes from earlier in the record. The idea was to write something that felt like it was moving toward a different future before being halted by the walls of the closed city and turning into a lament. Most important was that there be no closure – no closure in a closed place – and the final chords replicate the piano’s discordant overtones, evoking a distant foghorn.” Kom finishes: “The final lyric of the album affirms the residents’ refusal to communicate and their permanent turn inward.”

“Closed City” offers a final refusal rather than a resolution, reinforcing the album’s central concern with isolation that becomes self-sustaining.

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The album was composed during a two-week artist residency in January 2024 on a remote eastern archipelago in Finland’s North Karelia region. Living and working together in a centuries-old log house under extreme winter conditions, surrounded by frozen islands and remnants of a WWII-era military defence line along the Finnish-Russian border, the pair developed the conceptual and musical framework for Closed City. They were joined at points by Karelian kantele player Mammu Koskelo, whose presence further grounded the project in the region’s folk traditions.

Kom, who holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology, became particularly drawn to the history of Soviet-era “closed cities”: intentionally isolated settlements removed from official maps, built to house military, mining, or industrial operations, and populated by residents sworn to secrecy. From this research, Closed City imagines a nameless settlement forgotten by the outside world, its inhabitants bound to routine and vague labour, tending an endless fire beneath the city. When shadowy visitors emerge from the surrounding ice fog and press against the city’s glass palisades, the possibility of contact is ultimately rejected, and isolation is reaffirmed.

Musically, the album was composed by Duguay as an exploratory weave of experimental metal, folk, and orchestral brass, initially guided by the unstable overtones of an out-of-tune piano struggling against the deep January cold. Drawing influence from 20th-century totalism, collision music, and avant-metal lineages, the arrangements mirror Kom’s elliptical lyricism, conveying monotony, anxiety, and fleeting glimpses of life beyond the walls. Low brass features prominently throughout, its broad timbres evoking fog horns and distant signals across extreme weather.

The album was produced a year later in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where Kom and Duguay reconvened with a group of local collaborators. Recorded over five days in a decommissioned church and mixed by Canadian noise musician and scholar Ky Brooks, Closed City brings together guitars, synths, piano, field recordings, voice, and a six-piece low-brass ensemble into a cohesive and immersive sound world. Speaking on the project, Duguay and Kom reflect: “As a metaphor for intentional isolation and its unintended consequences, the closed city was on our minds while we wrote the music and lyrics in the frozen January of northern Karelia. The snow and ice seemed to go on forever, and the sun reflected the endless white and blinded us to the possibility that there could be anything outside of this strange and beautiful environment. Recording in St. John’s, a heavy fog descended on us and we found ourselves in another kind of closed city altogether. Most music exists somewhere between isolation and interaction; as much as we hope to tell a particular story about seclusion and remoteness with this record, we do so in the spirit of human connection.”

Closed City is out 27th March via Watch That Ends The Night.