New Featured Artist: EPICA

We're proud to welcome aboard Featured Artist #100: EPICA!

Smashing us through the big three digit barrier with a pick most epic, EPICA is a symphonic metal band from the Netherlands renowned worldwide for their melodic, cinematic and aggressive sound.

Thriving in the contrast between gentle, operatic vocals and gritty guitar riffs with twitchy metal-style percussion, EPICA is something of an international sensation, topping the charts at home and abroad with their unique blend of musical mastery.

We've got 21 new tracks lined up for you all today, spanning across three of their most popular albums - Solace System, The Holographic Principle and The Divine Conspiracy.

Check it all out:

The Solace System

Check out this showcase map hosted by Cris- of the Mappers' Guild!

Beyond the Matrix

Check out this showcase map hosted by Crissa of the Mappers' Guild!

Universal Death Squad

Check out this single-difficulty showcase challenge map by Mao of the Mappers' Guild, and this 2018 osu!taiko challenge map by Nardoxyribonucleic!

Dancing In A Hurricane

Check out this 2018 osu! challenge map by Hobbes2, which featured as a tiebreaker for the SS Tournament Group Stage!

Tear Down Your Walls

As has been the case with the other ninety-nine Featured Artists, all of the above plus a whole lot more are available right now over at EPICA's Featured Artist listing, pre-timed by your local neighborhood pishifat and awaiting your creative input.

Now that we've crested the big three digit threshold, we thought maybe you'd like to hear some of the hard numbers which help put things into perspective:

• We have cataloged over 2,500 tracks from across 100 artists.
• We have over 260 albums, with Electronic being the most popular category, closely followed by Rock, Metal, and Hardcore.
• Over 850 new maps have been created and ranked by members of the Mappers' Guild and the community to Featured Artist tracks in the past few years.
• There are 1,728 beatmaps from our Featured Artists that are ranked currently.
• New ranked maps made in the last two years set to Featured Artist tracks have been played over 174 million times.
• In total, beatmaps from our Featured Artists overall have been played over 693 million times.
• New Featured Artist maps from the past few years have been favorited over 91,000 times total.
• In total, maps from our Featured Artists have been favorited over 343,180 times.

...and all this is just the beginning!

We'll be making a few changes to the way things happen in the future as well - namely that we will be releasing two new Featured Artists every week, one on Wednesday as you've grown used to, and another one on Saturday - starting this week. This new schedule will continue for as long as we have the backlog to support it, which means it may slow back down to one weekly release without warning. We figure this is better than leaving artists in the wings for weeks when we could just release them instead. In addition to this, we'll no longer be releasing hints for new releases like before.

Other than that, we're grateful to have you with us during this wild musical ride, and we look forward to seeing what you all make in the future with our growing catalog of absurdly talented artists. Maybe one day in a few years time we'll look back on this announcement and think, "aww, only one hundred artists? How cute."

Check back this Saturday for more details about our next Featured Artist, and keep an eye on the @osugame Twitter for more tidbits and news you're sure to want to know.

—Ephemeral