(What follows is DGR‘s review of the stunning debut album from the Italian band Patristic, out now on Willowtip Records.)
The evolution of black metal as a genre remains as constant as ever. Its grasp is one that artists cannot seem to escape; there is an unholy draw to the offerings of the dramaticism, high-end shrieking, and outwardly reactionary and purposeful abrasiveness of the style. Each person approaches it as if they have something different to lay at its altar (offerings small or large) and thus the genre continues to find itself in a steady yet chaotic rate of high-speed metamorphosis. New ideas are interjected, rejected, stitched onto, and forced into place at times, but all creates this whirling sphere of metal that could eclipse galaxies in utter darkness.
Not every group is original or looking to change the book on things, which is how we’ve wound up with generational views of a genre that is also now well-aged. We’ve codified and crystalized certain styles — hell you could argue some have even ossified to the point of near parody. But the infernal harvest does remain forever fruitful, and whenever an artist you’ve been following for a while decides to take a crack at it, you can’t help but be intrigued.
How does a genre emerge once it is filtered through that particular creature’s viewpoint? Are there changes? Do they seek to just replicate and add to the pile of skulls already creating the throne or are they looking to adapt and bend it to their own ways? Is there a statement to be made in any regard that black metal becomes the only screen through which they push their own music?
Photo Credit: Dema Novakova
These questions arose in the case of Italy’s Patristic — founded by Hideous Divinity guitarist Enrico Schettino back in 2022 alongside Bedsore guitarist and vocalist Jacopo Gianmaria Pepe, with an EP entitled Apologetica being unleashed that same year. The three songs included in that EP hybridized Enrico‘s taste for brutal death with the smoke-filled auras and wailing atmospherics of black metal into an avante-garde and suffocating twenty-minute experience — which, given Enrico‘s taste for writing stuff that is continually overwhelming, showed that one truly cannot help themselves sometimes. It is an EP that remains somewhat underrated to this day.
In the time since there have been brief pulses of life from Patristic and their corner of the world as work steadily happened in the background, but as of recent years the project has seen both lineup changes and expansion, with Jacopo exiting and Enrico instead joined by drummer Nicolàs Petri and vocalist Lorenzo Sassi. Patristic no longer bears the marks of being just a maniacal side project but has now evolved into a band and creature all its own – one that as of June 20th, 2025 has unleashed its first full-length record via Willowtip Records, a forty-one minute conflagration bearing the name of Catechesis.
Patristic‘s Catechesis consists of two movements, further subdivided into separate songs but sharing the same title as if chapters in a book or cantos in a poem. The first segment consists of two songs making up the wider “A Vinculis Soluta” movement, whereas the rest of the album shares its titular namesake, the four-part “Catechesis” movement. It seems one might’ve existed before the other but the two together result in the album work. In a way, you could almost picture them being nailed together to form the album we now have before us.
Given that Patristic‘s aforemented Apologetica EP performed a similar act, the idea that the compositional approach would then be expanded out into full album form (doubling in equal measure the chapters of each movement even!) to form Catechesis makes sense. Both combine for forty-one minutes of atmospheric and overwhelming black and death metal that conjures up just as many demons as it wipes from the Earth. Which is why discussing them feels like grasping for metaphors that do not yet exist, because while the songs are clearly broken into complete works of their own – many even have a clearly demarcated ending point – they blend into each other enough to form one massive work. The issue comes largely from figuring out where to start.
Given that it consists of only two parts — though both are lengthier than the ones following — the “A Vinculis Soluta” pairing come across a little more urgent than the following four. The whole of Catechesis as an album is an immense journey to undertake, with enough twists, neck-snapping head turns, and dramatic atmospherics to stun any listener the first time through, but much of that initial rush does arrive courtesy of the collective “A Vinculis Soluta” opening act. Here, the music of Patristic is as equally black metal as it is overwhelming brutal death. Room for progressive creativity is laid asunder in favor of ratcheted intensity as the music drifts between abrasive and destructively distorted, to some actually straightforward black metal riff-work.
Surprisingly though, Patristic never fully give themselves over to the high-strung, rapid-picked, tremolo-favoring madness that has long been a throughline of black metal as a genre, instead favoring the crashing-of-the-waves style of melodic movement you might otherwise spot coming from a group like Ulcerate. Dissonance doesn’t quite get weaponized like you’d expect but there are clear moments wherein vocalist Lorenzo Sassi sounds as if he is delivering invocations just above a cliffside ravine and letting the valleys below echo back to him. Parts I and II of the “A Vinculis Soluta” movements do excellent work setting the stage for the titular songs to follow.
The “Catechesis” segment of the album takes up the bulk of this release, with three of its four parts each sailing well over the six-minute mark like an Olympian competing at a middle-school track and field meet. Given the room to breathe, Patristic show themselves to be quite creative in their genre-straddling to amass one huge work. Musically it is a little less up-front and intense — until “Catechesis II” and “Catechesis III” — but hearing the song grow into its own beast-like form is something to witness.
Patristic summon the spectres of a handful of different genres here, as they wander from the overwhelming collapse of civilization as a whole into something mournful and doom-laden to close things out. “Catechesis I” is practically defined by a ritualistic march-turned-funeral-dirge until its last few minutes wherein the band unleash an absolute monster of a death metal guitar part to rend asunder the few minutes before it. “Catechesis II” is defined by the smaller moments as the stage has mostly been set by its predecessor; there’s a very interesting bit of drum and cymbal work in the opening segment you wouldn’t otherwise expect, and the slower stomp of the song has the various parts-stacking driven by a surprising amount of rhythm section work.
“III” and “IV” take the song through its final conflagrations, and “IV” impressively is where the more mournful atmospherics come into play. The whole of the album ends on such a note that whatever miseries may have afflicted its musical protagonist, nothing was ever resolved or went particularly well. If one was told that the end of the album was intended to evoke someone completely falling apart at the seams after walking through a firestorm, it would be easily believed.
Patristic show themselves a new force to be reckoned with on their first full-length. Apologetica proved to be a shockingly good debut offering, and though some of the psychedelics of that disc have been left to the wayside for Patristic’s new album, the overwhelming force and dramaticism remain. Catechesis is a wildly impressive release — its fusion of multiple genres extruded through a black metal sphere into some sort of abyssal maelstrom makes for an album of constant discovery.
A full run of the album is as overwhelming and suffocating as you’d expect from one of the main minds behind Hideous Divinity but the extra amount of musical room afforded by not being “everything all the time and then some” allows Patristic to breathe, as wheezing and laboured as it may be for that creature by the end. The howling hellstorm that opens the album and on to the final, withered-to-nothing remains of the final song transform Catechesis into a musical event, and it is one that should not be missed.
https://bit.ly/catechesis-willowtip
https://patristic.bandcamp.com/album/catechesis
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