About Mortal Archive
History leaves more than names.
Mortal Archive makes research-led heavy metal. War Souls, its debut album, tells thirteen stories about animals remembered from wartime.
The project and its debut album.
Mortal Archive is an independent historical heavy-metal project made through human–machine collaboration. Its debut album, War Souls, turns thirteen animal stories into songs.
Each companion article cites its sources and marks disputed details, keeping the limits of the record clear.
Creative process
From a story to a song.
Every song begins with a story the artist chooses to explore. Research follows, drawing on records and accounts preserved by museums, historians, veterans, and other contributors. Online archives, search services, and AI tools help bring that material within reach, so the story can be understood alongside the gaps and uncertainties in its telling.
From that research, the lyrics and music begin to take shape. The artist works with several AI models and different kinds of creative tools, returning to each draft to question a line, change a passage, or try another direction. Some revisions are made by hand; others are developed or recreated with AI. This exchange continues until the artist approves the material.
The parts are then brought together for an AI system to generate the tracks. Listening opens another round of work: reviewing the recordings, making manual changes, and using AI to revise them further. The artist gives the final approval to each finished song. Human review and AI creation also shape the illustrations that accompany the stories.