SHADES OF BLACK: EMPTINESS, FÖGBÖTLER, CAGED BASTARD, MILLIONS OF THEM, WOLFZAHN, MERRIMACK

(written by Islander)

After yesterday’s big trough of music for gluttonous souls, I wasn’t sure what to do with this column today. I easily could have rewarded gluttony again. The platter of new black(ish) metal songs and complete releases that’s in front of me is so loaded it makes the trenchers groan. Given the obsessive nature of my mind, I felt compelled to put as much of it before you as I could manage.

But I didn’t. After nearly a week away, my spouse has returned home, and although she’s still sleeping as I write this, I’d like to be “present” whenever she wakes up. So I’ve cut this collection short (or at least shorter than what my obsessive mental gremlins were clamoring for), although this group includes a pair of EPs in addition to “singles”, so that might make the total duration of the music here longer than yesterday’s collection.

I’ve also again resorted to some of the short-cuts I used yesterday (almost no cover art, release info that looks like an inventory list, not quite as many of my own words). I don’t really want to resort to those short-cuts every weekend, but this weekend it had some relaxing benefits.

Enough introductory babble, here’s what I picked to recommend today.

 

EMPTINESS (Belgium)

Last week brought us another new song from a new Emptiness album. I shared some thoughts about the first single (“Clash of Forces“) here when it arrived in mid-May. The new one is “The Threat“.

It is indeed immediately threatening, and even more than that, destructive. It sounds like metal being mangled beneath writhing tones that distressingly wail. Big thudding grooves and popping beats provide the propulsion, and horrifying growls add to the chills. All together, these ingredients create a nightmarish but also muscle-throbbing experience.

As the song proceeds, the melodic eeriness in the high end becomes more panoramic and hazier, and the gloomy singing that emerges (reminiscent of dark post-punk) is equally eerie. It is a sinister kind of seduction being practiced here, but your legs will still bounce as it happens.

Song: “The Threat”
Album: Nowhere Speaks
Label: Season of Mist
Release date: July 17

https://orcd.co/emptinessnowherespeaks
https://emptiness.bandcamp.com/album/nowhere-speaks
https://www.facebook.com/Emptiness.be

 

FÖGBÖTLER (U.S.)

I found out about this next song from a Bandcamp e-mail alert because I’d previously bought an album via Bandcamp from the label (Edgewood Arsenal) that’s releasing the album that includes it.

After getting fired up by the song, I learned that the band includes a current and a former member of Construct of Lethe — Tony Petrocelly (guitar, bass) and Dave Schmidt (drums, vocals), so I’m less surprised the song is so good. They’ve got other band names on their resumes too. I also learned that Fögbötler released a debut album named Nebula Pestilentiæ in March 2025. Now I will have to track that down.

I’m pretty sure Fögbötler made up their name, but there’s nothing foggy about “Incineratio Ecstasis“. As the name of the song suggests, it becomes incendiary, and yet it’s not a full-bore sonic flamethrower. It slugs like a battering ram, rumbles like an avalanche, and the guitars also vibrantly twitch and ecstatically sparkle.

Even when the riffing boils, the moods it channels can sound bereft, and the bestial vocals also begin to sound wretchedly tormented. The song also includes whirring and high-flying guitar melodies that initially sound like a voice crying out in anguish.

The song packs in a lot of changing experiences, including riffing that sounds haughty and grand, but still unmistakably dark, as well as a slower-paced segment in which the vocals become even more monstrous and the melody even more grieving, and a concluding phase that pulls everything together in breathtaking fashion. Through it all, the drumming is also relentlessly dynamic (and powerful).

Song: “Incineratio Ecstasis”
Album: Disembowelment Ritual
Label: Edgewood Arsenal
Release date: July 31

https://edgewoodarsenal.bandcamp.com/album/disembowelment-ritual
https://www.facebook.com/edgewoodarsenalrecords

 

CAGED BASTARD (Tunisia)

The fires continue to burn hot within Caged Bastard, because in less than 10 days it will release a new album named Lighthouse as a fairly quick follow-up to three EPs released last year and an album-length song released this past January. This past week brought us the album’s second advance track, “Time Made Mass“, along with a jumpy, flashing video. Before we get to it, I’ll quote Caged Bastard’s eloquent statement about it:

“Time Made Mass” holds a central position within LIGHTHOUSE. The track is built around the idea that pressure has a formative role. Given enough time, force accumulates weight, and weight becomes structure. The flood, the sea, and the stone are recurring images throughout the song. They represent a process rather than an event, the movement from chaos toward form. Nothing is erased. Nothing is softened. What stays is carried forward and integrated into the structure itself. Musically, the track reflects that progression through repetition, density, and gradual accumulation. The weight is built layer by layer until it becomes inseparable from the foundation beneath it. Within the album, “Time Made Mass” marks the point where chaos ceases to be understood as pure destruction and reveals its capacity to shape. The title reflects that transformation: time becoming weight, weight becoming mass, mass becoming something capable of standing.

And then we have these words about the album as a whole:

Remains.
Like a lighthouse in hostile waters, the light does not intervene.
It does not rescue. It simply stands, unmoved, unshaken, revealing a way through the dark for those capable of navigating it.
It is the light that darkness could not erase.

The flashing video might have included a warning for epileptics, but the visuals suit the frantic nature of the music. The song immediately discharges blasting drums and layered guitars (and keys?) that drench the listener in immersive but disturbing waves of frenzied and distressing intensity, and the scorching vocals are no less chaos-ridden in their own intensity.

Caged Bastard does give listeners something of a break from the unnerving storm by introducing vibrant acoustic-guitar strumming in the midst of sudden bursts of crazed power. Those crazed bursts quickly introduce a strangely throbbing and ringing melody that then takes over in the song’s next phase, with hallucinatory yet head-hooking results.

The song’s discordant and disturbing frenzies resume, as if all remnants of sanity have finally been blown away, yet when that storming episode subsides into a kind of ghostly psychedelia, Crazed Bastard introduces one final ingredient that sounds dangerous and dismal.

I can understand Crazed Bastard’s references to the song as representing a process of transformation, but it is a very strange transformation, and one in which chaos never seems to be very far away.

Song: “Time Made Mass”
Album: Lighthouse
Release date: June 23

https://cagedbastard.bandcamp.com/album/lighthouse
https://www.facebook.com/cagedbastard

 

MILLIONS OF THEM (Belgium)

Now we get to the two EPs I promised. Rennie Resmini of starkweather pointed me to this first one a week or two ago. It appears to be this Antwerp band’s third release, but M-A doesn’t list any of them, maybe because the honchos over there brand it as noise rock or math rock or something else rather than metal.

I don’t really care what you want to call it, it blew my socks off and probably punched through my neighbors’ walls (mine are structurally reinforced because I listen to music like this).

Given the nature of the audience I’m addressing, I want to underscore just how ruinously jagged, humongously heavy, and borderline berserk these songs often are. The screamed vocals are definitely berserk (as well as ravenous), and so are the shrill and maniacally quivering guitar leads, and so are the fast-changing percussive variations.

The bass sounds quite capable of quarrying granite at high speed. The riffing riotously blares and feverishly pulsates, as well as frenetically squirms, grievously clangs, and abrasively sizzles. The vocals roar, raggedly cry out, and dismally moan as well as shriek. The tempos are in mad flux. Things change from moment to moment. The songs may leave the whites of your eyes showing all ’round.

EP: S/T EPII
Release date: January 6, 2026

https://millionsof.bandcamp.com/album/s-t-epii
https://www.facebook.com/millionsofthemhardcorebelgium

 

WOLFZAHN (U.S.)

The next EP, Lone Wolf Kommando, is the third release (after a pair of demos) by the U.S. black metal band Wolfzahn, whose three members have many other names on their Metal-Archives resumes.

Let me state right up-front that if you’re getting suspicions of sketchiness from the names of the band and this EP, you can rest easy. I’ve done my research and also received assurances from a trusted source. They’re just embracing their wolfish spirits.

The same trusted source summed up the EP’s music as “hyperactive riff city black metal”, and you’ll understand why. But the songs also reveal other interests at work, including a favoritism for melodies of archaic or mythic grandeur that panoramically sweep across the top of the searing riffage, the lycanthropic vocals, and the often-furious drums.

The songs are fantastical in other ways too, because of the tales they tell (occasionally elucidated by recorded samples), and they also deliver a lot of muscular bass-level punch and percussive dynamism. But it’s the sometimes barbarous and sometimes elegant glories of the music that leave the most lasting impression.

Sometimes the fire-fueled riffing and keys even sound like war-horns blazing from besieged battlements (though it may be packs of gnashing werewolves who have laid siege), as well as capturing the frenzies of battle and the desperation and defiance of forces with their backs against the wall.

The title song also includes bright strumming (also ancient in style and mood) and gently flowing melodic panoramas, in addition to encapsulations of cataclysm.

Well, as you can tell, these are the kind of songs that set fire to the imagination, even if you interpret them in a different way.

EP: Lone Wolf Kommando
Label: Oakheart Productions
Release date: June 12

https://wolfzahn.bandcamp.com/album/lone-wolf-kommando

 

MERRIMACK (France)

I couldn’t resist including this next song before moving on to the rest of the day — first, because it’s Merrimack, and second, because it’s their cover of a Depeche Mode song. That wasn’t on my black metal bingo card, but it makes me happy because I’ve been a Depeche Mode fan for a very long time.

The song is “Wrong“. It originally appeared on Depeche Mode’s 2009 album Sounds of the Universe. Here’s a bit of background about how the cover came into existence (extracted from a Season of Mist press release):

Merrimack recorded their cover of “Wrong” during the sessions for their 2012 album The Acausal Mass. The cover was shelved for more than a decade before the band returned to record vocals. Perversifier says their cover “highlights just how dark the original song already is”. They preserved all the notes from the original, only bringing “the level of violence that Black Metal can bring”. Where Depeche Mode channel obsessive self-negation through cold synth-pop, Merrimack strip away any distance the original might have offered.

Merrimack’s version is definitely more violent, more sweeping, more deeply tormented, than the original, and of course the vocals are unhinged (and hands-down the most violent aspect of this cover).

P.S. In case you’ve never heard the original song, you can listen here, as you watch the disturbing video that originally accompanied it.

https://orcd.co/merrimackwrong
https://merrimack.bandcamp.com/track/wrong-depeche-mode-cover
https://www.facebook.com/merrimackofficial