(written by Islander)
We have for you today what we think will be a big eye-popping surprise, a carnival of musical wonders, something like a black metal rock opera, namely a full stream of the forthcoming second album by the evil Italian wizards in Winternius.
Titled Underwater Darkness, it’s set for release on September 12th by the Dusktone label, and it follows the band’s 2020 debut album Open the Portal and their 2023 EP Kultra Nightmares.
Still at the helm is founder Roby Grinder, also known as Winternius during his time with Sacradis, a band active in the Italian black metal underground from 1996-2011. The lineup through the years has included members and former members of Sacradis, Spite Extreme Wing, Abysmal Grief, and Necrodeath.
Winternius call their music “Black Rising Metal”, and you may understand why when you hear this album. It’s certainly not conventional black metal by any stretch. Up in the first paragraph we’ve already hinted why, but would like to explain in greater (but hopefully not too tedious) detail.
It is sometimes best to begin at the beginning, and definitely so in the case of Underwater Darkness because it has the feeling of a saga unfolding (or, as already suggested, like a black metal rock opera).
The beginning of the album is a track that starts with an intro which combines the sound of waves and the swell of haunting strings and then launches into “Unholy Black Ship”, a fast-moving charge that itself combines deliriously feverish and eerily swirling fretwork, slowly roiling melodies with a searing and wailing tone, waves of heavy, ominous sound, and blasts of dark magisterial grandeur.
Like the fretwork, the drumming varies, discharging riotous blast-beats but also head-moving back-beats and slow, primitive blows. The vocals vary too, ranging from gritty cut-throat snarls (malicious and caustic in their viciousness) to sky-high singing, dominating pronouncements, and extravagant gang howls.
Altogether, these sensations create a dramatic narrative of evil, dread, and glorious turmoil with a persistently unearthly aura, capped by an equally unearthly guitar solo that spins out into a screaming, fret-melting ecstasy, and a further solo that resembles an energized saxophone.
With that one song, Winternius lay a lot of their cards on the table, displaying a taste for elaborate, multi-layered songwriting with a dynamic and theatrical flair, and a knack for combining savagery and melody, pulse-punching intensity and supernatural atmosphere, and almost more classic metal genre ingredients than you can count.
The album’s next three songs reinforce those impressions, from the wild, wicked, and adrenaline-fueled experience of “The Beacon” to the slow-moving perils, doomed gothic hauntings, and frantic explosiveness of “Dark Mirage”, which includes an interlude that’s both mystical and neck-bending, and the thrashy, blood-rushing, and thoroughly demonic riffage, bracing gallops, and cloud-high melodic wonders of “Gods of Hunger”.
Like the first track, these three are all home to riveting guitar solos, some of them flamethrowing and others that slowly and even soulfully swirl like the weaving of black-magic spells or scream toward the heavens. They’re also home to the kind of dramatic vocal variations revealed in the opening song, including singing both high and low as well as the fury of fiends that want to tear out your throat.
What follows that opening quartet of songs is one that, like the opener, combines an Intro phase (this time a phase of sinister and bleak symphonic melody) with a song, this time “The Abyss”, which is then succeeded by its own trio of followers — “Black Evil Cormorants”, “Vile Vortex”, and “Global Alien War”.
“The Abyss” introduces truly horrid growls into the already multifaceted vocal mix and is one of the album’s most frighteningly violent tracks, a ravaging whirlpool of sound augmented by pulverizing blast-beats, but it’s also one steeped in melodic sensations of epic tragedy.
The remaining three create similarly elaborate and dramatically changing pageants of wickedness, grandiosity, dread, and wrenching gloom — the kind of music that gets your heart beating hard and sets your imagination on fire, even if some of what you imagine will be nightmares. Needless to say at this point, all those songs include fantastic guitar solos too.
And with that (at last!), we’ll step aside and leave you to the wide-ranging marvels of Underwater Darkness:
Dusktone will release the album in a jewel-case CD edition, and digitally. They recommend it for fans of Immortal, early Borknagar, Dissection, “and lovers of 80s metal”.
PRE-ORDER:
https://dusktone.bandcamp.com/album/underwater-darkness
WINTERNIUS:
https://www.facebook.com/Winternius
https://www.instagram.com/Winternius/