A newly released album featuring traditional Gregorian chant tunes hit Amazon’s music store last week.

The 20-track album by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP), a clerical society devoted to the traditional Latin Mass, offers a sound that transports the listener back to ancient times. It was recorded in eastern Nebraska, at Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary, the international school for English-speaking seminarians of FSSP, as the Catholic News Agency reported.

Close

For their first album, the priests and seminarians chose to record the chants they sing.

“We sing them because it has always been part of human nature to express love and joy, despair and sadness.”

“The style of chant that we sing goes all the way back to ancient Rome, but it even has its sources, as certain people believe, in Jerusalem, with certain melodies [that are] Middle Eastern in origin,” Fr. Garrick Huang, co-music director of the Fraternity and a singer on “Requiem,” said in a statement.

“Rome has been cosmopolitan for centuries, of course, so it has always been a crossroads of many cultures,” Huang added. “There are even some sounds that we could say come from the East (Byzantine), or … different parts of the eastern empire.”

The album is a collection of funeral Mass chants in Latin.

Related: Singer Colton Dixon’s Dating Advice: ‘Don’t Compromise’

“We sing them because it has always been part of human nature to express love and joy, despair and sadness — the gamut of emotions — in song,” Huang said.

The album was produced by Grammy-winning producer Christopher Alder and engineer Brad Michel, in collaboration with De Montfort Music and Sony Classical. It’s now available on Amazon for $9.99 in MP3 format or $11.78 on CD.

Who do you think would win the Presidency?

By completing the poll, you agree to receive emails from LifeZette, occasional offers from our partners and that you've read and agree to our privacy policy and legal statement.

“This community has obviously put a lot of emphasis on concentrated musical training in their education of young men to become priests,” Alder said in a statement.

Related: Pope Gives the Catholic Church Two of Its Youngest Saints

Watch the video below for a short album preview:

[lz_third_party align=center includes=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_iQHw5b8z0]

“In this album we are hearing this type of music that was around long before Mozart, approaching the beginning of sacred music,” Fr. Zachary Akers, music director of the Fraternity and a singer on “Requiem,” said in a statement.