Hydra

Hydra is the sixth studio album by the heavy metal band Otep. It was released in 2013 on Victory Records. Hydra is a concept album. This is their only album to feature drum programming as opposed to live drums. It is the band's last album on Victory, as they completed their three-album contract with this record. Background Hydra is a concept album, based on a novel Otep Shamaya was working on from two years earlier, called None Shall Sleep. Otep explained the album's concept in a series of postings to Facebook:"It's a concept album about a girl corrupted by the world, corrugated by evil, ripped away from the golden, molten elixir of creativity, and abandoned on the placid, jagged rocks of a cruel and barbaric island where the rats poison themselves. This is a story of her personal alchemy of theophagy, revenge and righteousness. Her rise from the smoldering ash as a bruise that never heals transmuting, therianthropic, to the infinite, still-born messiah, a vigilante serial assassin, codename: Hydra." Recording The album was produced by Ulrich Wild, who had produced the band's previous two albums, Smash The Control Machine and Atavist. Otep's writing was based on the character of Hydra themselves, and attempted to write with the mindset of the character; “I realized I was not writing this record,” she explained in an interview to Albuquerque Journal. “Hydra was writing this record. I thought, ‘Why not hand it over to her?’ It was a difficult process to do that, living as that character … I wanted to do that, to live through this person, feel things that she was writing.” In several interviews for the album, Otep spoke about the album's songs in the third person, crediting "Hydra" for writing the songs.