A collaboration between GAI 荄, Windrunner, and the new project Pastgloom, “Victus Sum” is a melodic progressive metalcore single tied to the EP “Glass Angels Initiative: Code Orange.” All net proceeds go to VAVA to support families still living under the weight of Agent Orange contamination in Vietnam.
Decades have passed since U.S. military forces sprayed Agent Orange across Vietnamese terrain from 1961 to 1971. The jungle has grown back in many places. The war has its memorials. But for the families carrying dioxin in their bodies across generations, the consequences are anything but historical. Medical care, rehabilitation, and daily support. The need persists. Many of those families struggle to meet the ongoing costs of that care, and the world has largely moved on.
A New Project Born from a Different Energy
Pastgloom began as songs that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. The people behind GAI 荄 had been writing softer, more melodic material. The aggressive register that defines GAI 荄 ‘s sound wasn’t the right vehicle for it, and the lyrical approach the new songs were calling for, more poetic and inward-looking than confrontational, needed its own home. Windrunner entered the picture. A new name and aesthetic took shape. Pastgloom was born.
There is a real creative logic to this. Different energies call for different outlets, and it is clearly not in this group’s nature to force everything into a single frame. The EP’s production reflects that philosophy too. Everything was written, produced, filmed, and edited by the bands themselves, two music videos shot in a single day at HUB. Fully DIY, and it shows in the best possible way.
Two Perspectives on the Same Wound
The EP’s emotional core is a duology built around two tracks: “Ad Mortem” and “Victus Sum.”
“Ad Mortem” is told from the perspective of a mother who does not yet know what she is carrying. Her husband has died. She is grieving. And unknowingly, dioxin is already part of the story her body is writing.
“Victus Sum,” meaning roughly “I have been conquered,” takes the perspective of a young boy who lied about his age to enlist in the war during the last century. He is dying in the mud. He is thinking about his mother.
The title is drawn from a repeated lyrical refrain in “Ad Mortem,” pulling both tracks into a single emotional and narrative thread. Read in sequence, the two songs form something close to a complete portrait of what war and chemical contamination leave behind: not just death, but the generation that comes after. The remaining two tracks on the EP are instrumental.
The communities most affected by Agent Orange are not necessarily the ones with a platform or the energy left to demand one. That is part of what makes this release matter. A few people in a band decided the silence was no longer acceptable, made something honest with their own hands, and pointed it somewhere that counts.
