(written by Islander)
For reasons explained yesterday I’ve had less than the usual amount of time this week to explore new music from the blacker realms of extreme music. I’ll fall behind again next week due to MDFing and will likely leave a void in this column’s place next Sunday.
Bereft of the time needed to make a more complete survey this week, I randomly threw a couple handfuls of mental darts at all the tabs I’d opened for new songs and albums. There were misses, but enough solid hits to furnish the following collection, which I hope will both darken and immolate your day.
WAIDELOTTE (Ukraine)
Let’s begin with five individual songs, starting with “Crimson Waves,” a standalone single from the excellent Ukrainian band Waidelotte. The band, whose lineup includes current or former members of Floscule, White Ward, Soen, and Sectoral, explain:
This song reflects the Russian annexation of Crimea and the looting of historical artifacts, many of which have been illegally removed from the peninsula. The single’s cover art alludes to this narrative quite literally.
But the lyrics delve deeper — they explore a sense of loss tied to a stolen place of power: the northern Black Sea region, now under occupation. The song captures fragments of the land’s layered history and evokes the image of a summer sunrise on the shores of the Black Sea — a memory of beauty and presence that now feels distant, unreachable.
Waidelotte establish the song’s central melody with old instruments (hurdy-gurdy and tsymbaly) which give it a medieval resonance and a wistful and melancholy character, and then they carry the melody forward with fire and fury.
As the song evolves, they bring in heroic choral voices, frantically darting (and thoroughly exhilarating) fretwork, punchy grooves, and other melodic accents that grandly flow like broad waves, as well as entrancing folk singing by Alina Bezboroda at the end which again brings forward the feelings of wistfulness and sorrow; the preceding music, though head-spinning, also includes passages of even more pronounced bleakness.
A musical kaleidoscope for sure, the song merits the genre description provided by Debemur Morti Productions, even if that description might seem a bit bamboozling when first encountered: “progressive Folk-Black Metal”.
https://waidelottemusic.bandcamp.com/album/crimson-waves
https://www.facebook.com/waidelottemusic
https://www.instagram.com/waidelotteofficial
HÆRESIS (Germany)
I discovered this next song (which thematically unites with the preceding Waidelotte song) in the latest of Rennie Resmini’s starkweather Substack columns. He wrote this about it:
“First taste of Si vis pacem para bellum from HÆRESIS in the form of ‘Echoes of Ashes‘ is a monumental block of rampaging black metal approaching Slaughtersun speeds (and endurance) with an undercurrent of orchestrated synth splendor and vocal assists from Yaryna Borynets of Saltfalls/Löri and Machukha’s Natalia Androsova.”
At Bandcamp, the band explain the song’s inspiration:
This track opens the album and it confronts the brutal reality of Russia‘s full-scale Invasion of Ukraine – a war of aggression and imperial ambition that began in 2014.
Countless civilians have been abducted, tortured, raped and killed.
The initial Wave Wave of outrage has long faded, and in the public eye, Russia’s crimes continue – relentlessly, endlessly.
We are grateful to have two ukrainian voices with us on this piece: Yaryna Borynets (Saltfalls, Löri) and Natalia Androsova (Machukha).
Glory to Ukraine
I’ll add that the song is 11 1/2 minutes long, but creates a breathtaking and soul-shaking experience, rich in its many textures, that makes it very easy to lose track of time. By turns it is ethereal and haunting, ferociously desperate and incendiary, panoramic and grand (but deeply tragic in both its all-consuming sweep and its accents of poignant elegance). At the end the song significantly softens, and mourns again (that’s where the angelic guest vocals come in).
No lie, I came to the brink of tears repeatedly in listening to this, but I think even harder hearts will be stirred by it.
https://haeresis.bandcamp.com/track/echoes-of-ashes
http://www.facebook.com/haeresisberlin
HELL (U.S.)
Hard to know how to follow that last song. I decided that the best way was to move far away from it, to pick out something that wouldn’t be in competition or invite comparison but would instead ruthlessly throw people into a different mind-set. And, conveniently, there was Hell sitting in front of me.
Hell‘s new song is named “Hevy“, and fuck yes it is. It also could have been named “Ugly”, “Hateful”, or “Apocalyptic”.
It brings forward ruinously distorted notes evocative of the most hostile and harrowing forms of sludge/doom as well as primitive skull-stomping beats, cauterizing screams, and tortured cries. Even as the bone-dissolving notes change (periodically spiked with feedback-screams), it remains oppressively bleak, malignant, and tormented.
But the song is a long one, and so it translates those feelings in other ways too. It begins to brutally chop (a rhythmic decapitation) and miserably moan; a guitar begins to sizzle, boiling in pain, eventually left alone to bleed out until it’s joined by megaton bombs slowly detonating and tank-like pistons pumping — music as a weapon.
The song is from Hell‘s new album Submersus. It will be released by Sentient Ruin and Hell on July 11th.
https://sentientruin.bandcamp.com/album/submersus
https://www.facebook.com/mswhell/
CAVE (U.S.)
Having just sunk you into a life-draining pit of crushing affliction and hopelessness, I decided to leave you there, decohering and dissolving as you experience a new song from Cave.
“Usurp” is enlivened by the sharp snap of a clattering snare drum, but otherwise it’s populated by immensely abyssal forces — roiling riffage that sounds poisonously radioactive; weirdly bubbling but gut-heaving bass-lines of subterranean depth; and monstrously cavernous vocals.
The song becomes more catastrophic as it goes. Those ruinous, roiling tones grow more shrill and berserk; the drums clatter faster; the low-end sounds like its booming and gouging through granite; the bass seems even more ecstatically demented. The madcap drumwork threatens to steal the show, and so do the deranged burblings of the bass. The song turns out to be just as peculiar as it is brutally punishing.
It’s from a new album named Cave IV, which will be released by Centipede Abyss on May 29th. (If you don’t know, Cave is the solo work of a prolific musician who’s also behind dozens of other bands, including Acausal Intrusion, Vertebrae Fetish Totem, and Ukakuja.)
https://centipedeabyss.bandcamp.com/album/cave-iv
https://www.facebook.com/TheCentipedeAbyss/
FUNERAL BAPTISM (Romania/Argentina)
Obviously, the last two songs I picked moved us almost entirely beyond the bounds of black metal as it’s typically understood, so I thought I should move back there with the last individual song today, which comes from the first album in roughly 8 years from Funeral Baptism.
“Lex Talionis” dramatically rushes the blood and pounds the heart in many ways — and it sinks the heart too. Backed by rampantly charging and carefully cantering drums, the music sweeps forward in waves of glorious yet also grievous melody, laced with a rippling and wailing lead guitar.
The layered guitars also begin to sound both more warlike and more afflicted, but the riffing also begins to sound maliciously haughty and diabolical. Yet the stirring opening melody continues to surface and to sink its hooks more deeply into a listener, until near the end when the music slows and creates that heart-sinking effect alluded to earlier.
Throughout the song, the vocals are passionately inflamed (as is the music throughout) but also quite varied in their harshness.
The new Funeral Baptism album is named In Solitudine. It’s set for release by Loud Rage Music on May 30th. If you venture over to Bandcamp via the link below, you can also check out the new album’s title song.
https://loudragemusic.bandcamp.com/album/funeral-baptism-in-solitudine
https://www.facebook.com/funeralbaptismbm
TEARDRINKER (Netherlands)
I thought I ought to take up one complete record before calling it a day. I had so many choices, and not enough time to listen to even a fraction of them in order to make the selection. I decided to return to another recommendation from Rennie — a release that was also short enough I could manage to pull together some thoughts for today if I liked it — and like it I did!
Killing the Flowers Will Not Delay Spring is a two-song debut release by the Dutch band Teardrinker, with just enough black-metal influence to warrant its presence here, though the band more prominently name other stylistic ingredients — “screamo, post-hardcore and sludge.”
Both songs are bursting with harrowing emotional intensity. The first of the two songs, “Water/Well,” introduces dense, swarming, fuzz-coated tremolo’d riffage, bone-throbbing and body-moving rhythms of variable speed but burly weight, and wild, tormented cries from frontperson Kim at the bleeding edge of splitting apart.
That dense riffing is immersive, and the frothing and subsiding sea in which it submerges listeners is emotionally distressing, creating whirlpools of despair and undertows of hopelessness.
But those vocals (always shattering until near the end) fuel the music not only with pain but also a raging fury, and eventually there’s a phase in the music that sounds resilient, maybe even hopeful, a phase capped by a slow, cello-like solo that’s full of sorrow but also seems to yearn. Even when joined by a frantically sizzling guitar, that phase of the song is entrancing.
The very impressive craftsmanship of that first song, reflected in the songwriting, in the performances, and in the collage of tonal qualities, is on display again in the second and shorter song, “Equilibrium“. It’s initially more doomed but also initially more fierce as it starts thundering and boiling.
The music also channels a kind of dark and deleterious grandeur as Kim utters spoken words, but becomes fierce again, and a gloriously whirling and high-spiraling riff in the song has magnetic qualities (with us as its iron filings). Once again, the song slugs hard too, thanks to the band’s big bass, and the snare cracks the neck with equally compulsive effects. Once again, it seems that the vocalist holds nothing back.
Here’s what Rennie had to say about it:
Similar wheelhouse as Pluvia, “ecstatic black metal” merchants Teardrinker debut Killing the Flowers Will Not Delay Spring. 2 songs trampling fields of lilies and poppies in the Netherlands with unbridled, uplifting energy. Who knew the left hand path could be so exhilirating?
https://teardrinkerband.bandcamp.com/album/killing-the-flowers-will-not-delay-spring