In The Absence of Truth - Themes

Themes

The album features no printed lyrics, but it seems likely to connect with Isis's past legacy of concept albums, wherein some of the lyrics (such as "She was his queen" from "Dulcinea") relate to past themes. Turner has confirmed the presence of a concept: "I won't say what the concept is, but I can give you some clues about what inspired it: Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Islamic mystic cult leader, Don Quixote, House of Leaves, and Labyrinths." However; from repeated explanation of what inspired Oceanic and Panopticon, his stance changed. "Through explaining the last two albums time and time again, I just started to become weary of the topic, and I started to feel like I was losing my connection to the music and the lyrics simply from having repeated it so many times. And for me, personally, it's really important to maintain that connection as much as possible. I feel there's a lot of emphasis these days placed on explaining everything in such a fashion that there's really nothing left for the listener or reader to explore themselves. It's all spelled out. So it's interesting to leave some of that stuff open-ended so they have do to a little bit of legwork themselves." Drummer Aaron Harris explains this further, saying that the album is based “on personal perception of anything and what's true and what's not true.”

Gitta Sereny's book on Nazi Minister of Arms, Albert Speer, also inspired Turner; to him, it illustrated how society has a “tendency to portray the enemy as very one-sided and one-dimensional.”

The album takes its title from a quote often attributed to Hassan-i-Sabbah: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted". When it comes to how this quote relates to the album's concept, Turner is again reluctant to reveal too much. "I'll just say that much of working on this record, for me, was about the power and nature of perception, and the ways in which it affects our behavior and the way we see the world," he says. "I'll just leave it at that, and people can draw their own conclusions."

Track titles explicitly reference Hassan-i-Sabah's garden Firdous e Bareen, and Dulcinea, a character in Don Quixote. In relation to Dulcinea, Turner does allow a hint at the meaning: "That is just toying with the idea of perception, and the very thin line between illusion and reality", he says.

The cover artwork is described as "somewhat representational", but that the gauze-like strips don't "necessarily indicate one specific object or another". However, Turner having previously stated that "the songwriting and the artwork come from the same place". It is "sort of at the heart of what was writing about. And also, there's a progression of ideas from this very tightly bound, opaque mass into something that eventually starts to split up and open up and evolve into nothingness."

The band released lyrics from certain tracks ("Dulcinea", "Garden of Light") on T-shirt designs, and in 2009 all the album's lyrics were made available on their official website.