Flying Dirty Clouds, the Istanbul death metal and grindcore project founded in 1993, approaches “Opathian” through a question about lives left unlived. Guitarist and composer Kerem Şahinboy connects the song to his own thoughts about different choices, and to the pressure of measuring a life against those seen on a phone screen.
Released in August 2026 through Earache Digital Distribution, “Opathian” is part of a succession of individual singles. Şahinboy describes each as having its own subject, sound, and musicians. In the accompanying video by Zeynep Ela Şahinboy, a solitary astronaut gives that particular song’s subject a human figure. Şahinboy explains the choice of space as a way to represent an enormous sense of loneliness.
Watch “Opathian” on YouTube | Listen on Spotify
Three questions
(1) Doomnation Radio: Why did you choose “Opathian” to represent Flying Dirty Clouds at this stage of the project’s history?
Kerem Şahinboy: “Opathian” is our latest single. Other than being our newest track, it doesn’t really have any special status compared with the others. Every Flying Dirty Clouds song is its own little world, with a different concept, guitar sound, set of instruments and even different musicians involved. If there’s one thing that makes “Opathian” particularly personal to me, it’s that I’ve been asking myself the very question at the heart of the lyrics: what if I’d made different choices? Could I have ended up living a completely different life? It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately.
(2) Doomnation Radio: Does this single stand on its own, or is it part of a larger release or series of songs? If there is a larger work, where does it belong within it?
Kerem Şahinboy: We’ve been steering clear of the idea of releasing an album for quite a long time now. The way people listen to music has changed. We’re generally less patient, and our attention spans seem shorter than they used to be. I honestly can’t remember the last time I sat down and listened to an album from beginning to end. So we decided we’d rather put out one or a few singles each year.
Every one of our songs has its own personality, and there isn’t really a conceptual thread connecting them. One might be about heartbreak, while another takes a swipe at the exploitation of religion. In one song we might explore that feeling of being trapped or falling apart, and in the next we might take a political, anarchist stance.
I think of our songs as pixels being added to a picture. Stand back a little and look at the whole thing, and you might see Flying Dirty Clouds as an anti-music band that keeps changing shape and pushing at the boundaries of creativity. Perhaps that’s our “larger work” after all.
(3) Doomnation Radio: Your video follows an astronaut in isolation. How did that figure become the visual counterpart to the song’s psychological subject?
Kerem Şahinboy: That’s a lovely question, and a really thoughtful one. “Opathian” touches on something I think many of us ask ourselves these days: could my life have turned out differently?
We’ve always known there are all sorts of different people in the world. Yet now, thanks to the smartphones in our hands, we’re all looking at the same content, the same news, the same trends and the same versions of reality. We drink more or less the same things, dress increasingly alike, and even our lives and the way we see the world have started to look remarkably similar. We spend so much time watching other people that we’ve become strangers to ourselves. We scroll through TikTok, see somebody else’s life, wish it were ours, and somehow come away feeling that our own life is lacking. I think that’s a kind of sickness, and we need to find a way out of it.
Almost everyone seems lonely. Almost everyone is chasing a different life, and almost everyone is fighting a battle of their own. We felt that the only way to capture that enormous sense of loneliness was through the vast emptiness of space. A lot of us are every bit as isolated as the astronaut in our video.
That person in the video is me. Or perhaps it’s you. We all have dreams, disappointments, ambitions and moments when we feel we’ve lost something along the way. And yet, somehow, we manage to keep that spark of life going and carry on fighting.
I’m not sure whether that quite answers your question, but I hope it comes close.
“Opathian” by Flying Dirty Clouds is available on Spotify.
