SHADES OF BLACK: THE STONE, ENTHRONED, BURIAL GIFT, WIJRA, MORBONOCT, REMAINING WARMTH

(written by Islander)

If you missed yesterday’s roundup of new music you missed some very good and very diverse tunes. You also missed my alert about a request for help I’ll be making to our readers tomorrow. Catch up on all of that if you can.

For today’s assembly of black and blackish metal I picked four songs from albums that will be released later this month or in December, plus two EPs that I caught up with in the last couple of days.

 

THE STONE (Serbia)

Now almost 30 years into their career, the Serbian black metal band The Stone have a 10th album (Kletva) coming out on November 28th on the Immortal Frost label. I really need to make time to listen to it in full, but so far I’ve only heard the singles that have been released. The latest one is “Trag u večnosti” (translated by google as “A Trace In Eternity”). It premiered a couple of days ago with a mysterious but riveting video that begins with the eye of a wolf opening, and then moves through a collage of natural wonders, moving chains, hooded figures, and ancient occult imagery.

You can tell that veterans made this song, but not veterans who have become complacent. The songwriting reveals not only compelling melodic riffs but also a refined talent for varying those leitmotifs as the song goes on, without losing their threads. For example, the dense opening riff rises, falls, and writhes in a way that sounds simultaneously dismal and distressed, and then morphs into even more distraught moods, pierced by frantic guitar leads.

The adaptations don’t stop there. Although The Stone continue returning to that opening riff, they intersperse it with alterations that sound menacing and sinister, oppressive and forlorn, but the rapid whir of the lead guitar also blazes, and the music also gloriously soars and violently explodes.

The song also reveals other signal aspects of The Stone’s music — vocals that sound like a wild ravenous animal temporarily given human form (the ferocity is unchained); electrifying drum patterns; and full-throttle bass-lines. It’s all breathtaking, and intensely memorable.

https://lnk.to/kletva
https://immortalfrostproductions1.bandcamp.com/album/kletva
https://www.facebook.com/thestonehorde
https://thestonehorde.bandcamp.com

 

ENTHRONED (Belgium)

Like The Stone, Enthroned have existed since the mid-’90s. Their 12th album, Ashspawn, will be coming out on December 5th via Season of Mist. The past week brought forth the third single (“Ashen Advocacy“) from the new album, and it comes up next in today’s collection.

This is not an easy listen, not easy at all, not intended to make anyone comfortable, probably including a majority of black metal fans. Words like “unnerving” and “unsettling” have come to mind every time I’ve heard it, and yes, I’ve listened to it a lot despite how disturbing it is. I haven’t quite figured out why, except maybe I enjoy nightmares more than I think I do.

The riffing is rough on the ears, caustic in tone and dissonant. While big drums boom and cacophonous voices vent their turmoil, the music sounds miserable, but then the guitars start frantically skittering and swarming as the main vocals scorch the ears with their madness and percussive tones clack like wooden clappers (or like the judgmental hammering of a gavel). The song begins to resemble some hellish occult ritual.

Bells toll; the drums vanish; the music crackles and wails; and then that insectile guitar motif frantically insinuates itself again; the vocals seem even more fanatical; blast-beats erupt; and the riffing becomes a chaotic and ruthlessly abrasive swarm.

Even when the music briefly enters a hallucinatory phase, in which it sounds like the band set a bass guitar on fire; it’s still unnerving, and remains so even when the drums beat a slow, staggering march and the guitars slowly claw in agony. Madness and mayhem reign at the end.

And man, those vocals… just absolutely unhinged and terrifying.

https://orcd.co/enthronedashspawn
https://enthroned.bandcamp.com/album/ashspawn
https://www.facebook.com/frater.silurian

 

BURIAL GIFT (U.S.)

Hailing from New Orleans, Louisiana, Burial Gift digitally self-released their debut EP MMXXV in July of this year. It snagged the attention of Eihwaz Recordings, which will be releasing a cassette-tape edition of the EP on December 1st. A press release about that is how I discovered MMXXV — better late than never, it turns out.

I understand why Eihwaz wanted to do this forthcoming tape release. Burial Gift have a distinctive musical personality, one that I’m tempted to call idiosyncratic except I don’t want people to reflexively pigeon-hole them as “weirdo black metal”. It’s not that — people who enjoy hooky riffs and compelling melodies will enjoy this. But the music is full of surprises.

The opening song “Sear” takes off in a full-throttle rush right away. Driven by furiously hammering drums and drenched in dense and abrasive riffing, it creates a distraught and desperate mood, made even more intense by the wildness of the screaming vocals. But the band also bring in their first surprise — a brightly toned and frantically darting and swirling pair of lead guitars, which also sound wild, teetering on an edge between jubilation and despair.

More surprises lie ahead, including pounding grooves and depressive chords, but also glinting strings, the reverberation of mesmerizing mandolin-like trills, and gently musing bass notes. The music surges again, channeling a kind of desperate yearning (especially the charismatic lead-guitar whirring), and the song begins to sound like certain variants of Cascadian black metal — but still groovesome, and still intensified by spine-tingling vocal torment.

The next two songs, “Elegy Azure” and “Hollow Bloom“, also display frightening vocal ferocity, neck-cracking drumwork, and a lot of stylistic and emotional dynamism.

“Elegy Azure” includes both heavy jackhammer grooves and thrilling lead-guitar vibrations, as well as a panoply of dark melodies, dramatic ebbs and flows in speed and intensity, a spectacular guitar solo that might mark the EP’s highpoint, and an expansion of scale that renders the music in lush, panoramic breadth above a very burly bass line.

“Hollow Bloom” is just as much of a head-spinner as the first two songs, and just as dark in its moods. It’s slow, gentle, and beautiful, but also an emotionally devastating sonic tornado. It seems to channel confusion and anguish (paired with exhilarating drum-fills), and to broaden the music’s expanse again, as if intensely beseeching for some kind of relief.

It also includes a mesmerizing prog-rock instrumental interlude (the drumming is once again amazing there), and yet another stunning guitar solo that seems made for an enormous arena.

A really remarkable debut, one that leaves me very eager to see what these people do next. I think fans of such bands as Agalloch and Panopticon will be especially appreciative.

https://burialgift1.bandcamp.com/album/mmxxv
https://www.instagram.com/burialgift

 

WIJRA (Sweden)

In addition to getting press releases and other messages from labels and PR agents every day, we also get e-mails directly from bands. Some of those bands are taking their first steps musically, and are thus black boxes not only for me but for most other people. Sadly, I just don’t have time to listen to everything that comes in (I don’t listen to everything labels or PR agents are writing about either). What I do listen to is often a very random process, and often a function of how much time I happen to have on a given day.

In recent days I had more free time than usual and happened to spend some of it with Nattro, the debut EP of a one-man band from Sweden named Wijra, who had written us. As I listened to the EP’s opening song “Vilan“, I found myself thinking that the EP’s cover art really does an excellent job capturing the sensations of the music.

The song packs a solid rocking groove and growling bass-throbs, and it sets the hook very fast with melodic riffing that brightly rings. And so it’s both dark and brilliant, much like seeing the strange colorful brilliance shining within that dark forest in the cover art.

Raw howls and splintering screams, reminiscent of depressive black metal vocal stylings, add to the song’s darkness, as does the lonely throb of a guitar and haunted singing. But those vividly vibrating guitar-leads won’t be smothered; they come back to dazzle and beguile the listener, and to offer some measure of resilience and hope.

The song isn’t strictly black metal. Maybe an intersection of depressive black metal and post-metal, and maybe with some dark post-punk influence in the mix? It’s definitely highly infectious.

Wijra continues to display the multi-faceted nature of its interests, and its talent for crafting heart-sinking and heart-ringing melodies, in the two-part song “Oönskad“. Part 1 is a very dark and spellbinding folk song, with vocals that seem to express depression in terms that are downtrodden and gasping but also explosively wretched, while Part 2 burns like wildfire but also includes dismal wails as well as unchained screams, and dismal melody as well as a vibrantly glittering solo — plus a gentle guitar interlude that seems to connect with Part 1.

“Oönskad” (Parts 1 and 2) isn’t as catchy as Vilan — and it dives much deeper into distressing strains of depressive black metal — but the melodies are still quite moving, even if they’re moving listeners into emotional sinkholes.

The following song, “Underjord“, is also distressing — heart-breaking and emotionally depleted but featuring high-flown singing that’s unmistakably impassioned, as well as those terrorizing screams. Yet it also seems to fight back, thanks to big slugging grooves and vibrantly vibrating riffage that begin to climb, with the ascent capped by fiery soloing and vivid tremolo’d chords. (And once again, nary a blast-beat to be found anywhere.)

The EP closes with an extended version of “Oönskad Pt. 1“. It sounds elegant and ancient, deeply melancholy but also mystical and mesmerizing. It also sounds like Wijra found some specters to join in the vocals. A sad but sublime way to conclude an impressive first step by Wijra.

https://wijra.bandcamp.com/album/nattro
https://open.spotify.com/artist/5Rv40hDOGB1AgvLG3YZNB6
https://www.instagram.com/wijraofficial/

 

MORBONOCT (Ukraine)

Beginning in 2021 Morbonoct has released one album per year, and so 2025 is the occasion for their fifth one. They’re a two-person outfit — instrumentalist Alexander Medvedev and vocalist/lyricist David Welnicki — and they summarize their music as “cosmic black metal”. A press release we received recommended their music for fans of Limbonic Art and Darkspace, and that was the hook for me.

The name of their forthcoming fifth album (set for independent release on December 12th) is No One Knows We’re Dying. Its first single, “Cold Wind“, is my next pick today. You need to get comfortable before you start this one, because it’s nearly 12 minutes long.

Rather than start slowly and softly and building from there, Morbonoct jump from the starting gate with vividly clattering beats, wildly roiling and writhing tremolo’d riffage that carries an intensely disturbed energy; the screams of a cornered panther; and the roars of a cornered bear. The wounded vocals are wrenching to hear, and so is the mania in the riffing.

The riffing gets darker and more ominous, as well as more depraved, and the rhythm section add to the music’s variations, with the drummer switching up the patterns and a noticeable bass performance both tunneling through stone and bounding about. And then things do soften, but not comfortably so.

Frog-like croacking noises meld with brittle, gleaming strings; fiendish gasps can be heard; the bass clangs while ethereal shimmering tones waft around; and then the music swells, brilliantly and wondrously ringing in the rafters and viscerally throbbing down below. Now the building happens — as the band start vigorously slugging, feverishly vibrating, and viciously growling, backed by off-kilter drumwork.

From there they briefly turn the music in more hallucinatory directions before leaping ahead in another surge of battering and broiling sound (though the music sounds surreal there too, thanks in part to the advent of brightly pinging ethereal keys that evoke a feeling of wonder).

https://morbonoct.bandcamp.com/album/no-one-knows-we-re-dying
https://www.instagram.com/morbonoct

 

REMAINING WARMTH (Russia)

Remaining Warmth is a project created by Andrey Novozhilov (of Trna, Olhava, and Reverb On Repeat) and Pavel Kolosov (APRS, Alles Wird In Flammen Stehen, Ashen Throne, Volkota). On November 21st Reflection Nebula will self-release their second album, When the Night Ends, which quickly follows the band’s June 2025 debut album, Before the Years.

So far, I’ve listened to “Pale Wood“, the only song from the new album that’s streaming at Bandcamp as of today. I did that because I’ve enjoyed (and of course written about) the music of some of the other bands in which the Remaining Warmth members have paricipated. “Pale Wood” struck a favorable chord too.

Blackgaze is the name of this game. The band’s debut album didn’t include vocals, and I’m not 100% positive that this one does either, though in the far distance it does sound like some tormented soul is screaming. What dominates the music are searing and gloriously magnificent swaths of guitars and keys, stratospheric in their height, symphonic in their power, and celestial in their scale.

The undercurrents consist mainly of blast-beat propulsion and nimble-fingered bass-work, and in the midst of the sweeping cascades overhead, brilliantly flickering guitars add to the music’s dazzling impact. It’s the kind of thing that sucks the wind from the lungs and puts the heart in the throat, though when the drums briefly vanish and then start scampering, the music also begins to sound more disturbing — still glorious but maybe also anguished.

If you want to just become engulfed and elevated, with nerves on fire and mind flying high, this will do the job.

https://remainingwarmth.bandcamp.com/album/when-the-night-ends
https://www.facebook.com/remainingwarmth/