(written by Islander)
As many of you will know, I usually post a column at NCS on Sundays with recommendations in the expanding orbit of black metal. I wasn’t able to do that last Sunday due to leaving home on the early side of the day for what turned out to be a cool birthday celebration in a forest for a friend. I had made some choices for the column by then, and wanted to carry through with them whenever I could this week, while adding a couple of songs I’ve discovered since last weekend.
But it took me nearly all week to get this finished. It comes to you on another day when I’m about to depart from home and computer for most of the day; I have a ridiculously early start on a journey to the Seattle airport for a long weekend vacation. I’m doubtful that I’ll be able to assemble the usual new-music roundups for this coming Saturday and Sunday, but we shall see.
In the collection you’re now looking at I’ve interwoven an album, an EP, and four singles.
DARK PLAGUE (France)
I jumped on board the Dark Plague plague-wagon with their fourth album Be More or Fade Away, which was released in 2019, and then devoured their fifth one, The Threshold of Death, in 2024. Both albums displayed strange cover art. So does their sixth one, Masquerade, which was released late last week. All of drawings are the work of one Ludo Godot. Like the fifth album, this new one also includes the work of Kevin Paradis as session drummer, accompanying the Dark Plague trio of Daimon, Infestus, and Lord of Misery.
I enjoyed the band’s description of the new album’s themes, which is grim but has the ring of truth to it, so I’ll share it here:
Masquerade explores social hypocrisy and the silent violence of false pretenses.
This daily mechanism that forces us to wear a face that is not our own, to shape our words, our gestures, our desires in order to avoid punishment, contempt, and exclusion.
Behind the mask: true nature.The one we suffocate. The one we lock away.
But the mask is also one of concealment: the one we wear to better deceive, hidden beneath the trappings of virtue.
Lurking in the depths, our instinct takes shelter there in silence.
Because the world is a masquerade, this is our Masquerade.
Dark Plague begin with “Social Sickness“, which begins in surreal fashion and then storms with blazing riffs, enormous bass-throbs, rumbling and cracking beats, and scorching screams that fight to be heard through the electrifying tumult. The music continues to surge and pulsate, but shifts between passages of menace, segments of fury, and panoramic waves of ominous imperiousness accented by frantic soloing with an esoteric air.
It’s a breathtaking way to begin, and more than a little scary too. And so it’s quite surprising to hear them pivot from that hurricane-strength opening to the gently ringing and very haunting guitar overture that begins “Overwhelmed“. But don’t get too caught up in that eerie spell, because after about a minute the song suddenly becomes more dangerous.
Again, Dark Plague menacingly thrust and throb, rumble and thump, and again they infiltrate the music with sorcerous guitar leads that carry an exotic Middle Eastern melody, and they stab it with scalding screams and gritty snarls.
They also increasingly dial up the tempo, making the music sound both more feral and more ferocious, until the drums begin blasting and the music roils and gleams like some vast tornado of fire. It reinforces the perception that Dark Plague are quite good at sucking the wind from listeners’ lungs and submerging us in frightful tempests of devastating scale.
In the following six songs (and especially the last one), the band continue providing different kinds of brief diversions from the enormity of their greatest phases of scope and intensity, but they also continue returning to those gale-force, war-zone zeniths and accenting them with elaborate lead-guitar trills, elegant keyboard embellishments (or guitars that sound like keys), and lots of dynamic drum progressions, all of which collectively transform the hurricanes into a kind of terrible (and fantastical) pageantry.
Some of those accents and embellishments brought to mind prog-rock extravaganzas from many decades past, and others reinforce more esoteric and supernatural musical themes. It won’t surprise experienced listeners to learn that the fantastic drumming of Kevin Paradis beautifully complements both this trio’s most savage and their most theatrical extravagances.
https://darkplague.bandcamp.com/album/masquerade
https://www.facebook.com/p/DARK-PLAGUE-100064130074753/
PYRE OF DESCENT (Germany)
In early 2020 I hosted the premiere of the debut EP by the Berlin-based band, Pyre of Descent. That EP, Peaks Of Eternal Light, put lots of thoughts in my head, which of course I shared along with the music.
Later that same year they released another EP (Love’s Sombre Death), and now they have a debut album named Albedo that’s headed for release this coming September. It’s described by one of the band’s labels as “a mature form of occult/dark rock with some post-punk and gothic sensibilities, somewhere at the intersection of Fields of the Nephilim, The Devil’s Blood, and Aluk Todolo.”
The first song made available for listening is “Die For Us“. It’s not the kind of harsh and heavy music we often showcase here, but instead it deploys dual guitars to create a musical seduction, a kind of mysterious, beckoning embrace with an edge of danger. The drums rock instead of race, and the guitars vibrantly ring and woozily swirl instead of slashing and sawing, but the vocals are deep, dramatic, and demonic, partly growled and partly sung in quavering tones.
The song is a muscle-moving, hook-laden creature, but the band also change it near the mid-point, slowing the pace, giving the bass a place of prominence, and showering listeners with bright chime-like tones, like metallic petals falling in some very strange grove. The changing interplay of the stringed instruments continues to create powerful seductions, though some of them are quite dark. You may have trouble finding your way out of this grove.
Of course this isn’t black metal, but you should have no trouble understanding why I included it in a column like this one.
Albedo will be released by Rubeus Obex (double-LP in the U.S.), Swiss Dark Nights (CD), and the band (double-LP in Europe) on September 23rd, the autumnal equinox.
https://rubeusobex.bandcamp.com/album/albedo
https://pyreofdescent.bandcamp.com/album/loves-sombre-death
LA BESTIA DE GEVAUDAN (Chile)
This next song may initially confuse people as to what it’s doing in this column. Initially, I wasn’t sure what to make of it, or whether I was going to enjoy it. That changed, and I thought it would follow quite well from the song just above, though I suppose there may still be some confusion about its placement in this column, especially since La Bestia de Gevaudan has been granted no place in Metal-Archives. But please bear with me.
I don’t think I knew anything about this band or their music before watching their mysterious video for “Signals Lost“, which is a new version of an older song called “Fig 5” that they released in their 2015 album Feral. It caught my attention because this new recording includes vocals by Löic Rosetti, former lead singer of The Ocean Collective.
Löic Rosetti‘s singing is (no surprise) quite good, and the lyrics are equally good, as you’ll quickly discover. The song’s vividly skipping and jumping beats make a good counterpart for the shivering, brightly toned guitars, the gently humming bass, and the high-flying vocals.
The guitars become even more ethereal before the moon turns red, and then one of them sounds much grittier as it growls beneath a keyboard’s shimmering stratospheric sheen. In the song’s penultimate phase, the music dramatically intensifies and the band’s own harsher vocals intrude, though the instrumental outro piece is both dreamy and funky.
This new song is the last track on an extensive compilation titled Todos las Manos, which was released in aid of the victims of the earthquake that struck Venezuela in June 2026. It will be available exclusively on Bandcamp from August 7 to August 31. The song is also included on a re-mastered version of the band’s album Feral, which came out last December.
https://labestiadegevaudan.bandcamp.com/album/todas-las-manos
https://labestiadegevaudan.bandcamp.com/album/feral-remaster-2025
https://www.facebook.com/bestiadegevaudan
MATAVITATAU (Belgium)
Now we pivot from a single song to another complete release, this one a new EP by the unconventional Belgian band Matavitatau. The EP, titled Taeda Inversa, follows the band’s debut 2025 demo Numen Nescio, which I spilled a lot of words about here. Speaking for myself as a listener, I wrote: “Above all, it sounds like the looming and lusting presence of Death — its ravenous hungers, never sated, and the agonies and fanaticism of the lives that nourish it.”
Taeda Inversa is a paradox, an example of music whose ingredients are far from mesmerizing (“raw black metal” is a fitting descriptor) yet are still capable of creating a trance state. The vocals are also quite distinctive, both in their choice of words and in their expression of them (more about this in a minute).
The EP’s opening song “Nunc Ululate” is a mainly instrumental overture that creates an eerie and unnerving experience as layered tones frantically shiver, dismally moan, and perniciously sizzle, with a few jagged incantations and scant beats in the mix.
After that “Aliter Lachesi Visum” launches with vigorously rumbling drums, murmuring bass notes, and the onset of riffing whose timbre puts me in mind of the swirling and screaming noise of a power-tool grinding metal, like some big orbital sander shearing the barbs off roughly-cut steel. You can hear the furious abrasion, see the sparks, smell the thick metallic fumes. And then the vocals arrive.
Matavitatau prepare their lyrics exclusively in Latin, sourcing them from Roman poets from classical, medieval, and renaissance times. Their vocalist Θ is well-positioned to express the fragments they’ve chosen, since he is trained as a classical philologist and has taught Latin (and to a lesser extent Ancient Greek) for 20 years.
But his voice would be astonishing regardless of the words. He vents the lyrics in the wildest of yells, the most wolfish of snarls, the most tormented of wails. They are crazed and tortured sounds, and they make the unnerving impact of the guitars even more unnerving.
It may be the primitive, ritualized nature of the drumming and those urgently murmuring (and prog-influenced) bass-lines that begin to make the music entrancing, though the slowly writhing and occasionally convulsive or throbbing nature of the abrading yet glittering riffage begins to cast its own unexpected spell, a spell enhanced by shrill lead-guitar apparitions.
The next three songs deploy similar ingredients, though with changing moods, some fraught and some frantic, some steeped in pain and some caught in the throes of delirium, some feeling like a hopeless crossing of the Styx and some glorious. They all sound otherworldly, like time-traveling hallucinations. The vocals remain startling in the degree of their fanatical and often ghastly intensity.
To be clear, although the abrasive and mangling timbre of the riffing and the relative dimness of the rhythm section may challenge some listeners, these songs do have riffs and emotive melodies, and they’re pretty compelling too.
Taeda Inversa is being released by Altare Productions from Portugal in a limited CD edition that also includes the complete Numen Nescio demo as bonus tracks, for about 55 minutes of total music.
https://matavitatau.bandcamp.com/album/taeda-inversa
https://altare.pt/produto/matavitatau-taeda-inversa-digi-cd/
SPIRIT POSSESSION (U.S.)
Now we’ll pivot again from a complete release to individual songs for today’s last two selections. The first of those was launched earlier this week by Profound Lore. It’s the title track and first song divulged from a new album by the Oregonian duo Spirit Possession; the album’s name is Cathedral Speech.
This song initially reminds in some ways of those Matavitatau creations above. The music’s shrill tones sear and wail above primitive thumping beats, and there might be vocals in that mix which sound monastic. But the beats become more frantic, the riffing both more blaring and more slithering (but still searing), and the vocals violently explode in cacophonous throat-ripping screams and grisly grunts.
The drumming shifts around a lot, speeding up and slowing down and changing patterns, and the riffing changes too, but it always sounds unhinged — until about three minutes in, when the music softens and the prancing guitars begin to sound medieval. Even when the drums pick up the pace, that ancient air remains, thanks to bright, flute-like and horn-like melodies, though the music also scathes — and the vocals really scald like acid, bellow like bulls, and grunt like rutting behemoths.
It’s a highly devilish song, crazed in many ways and off-balancing like a big top on which we’re trying to hang on as it spins, but a big thriller in every veering respect.
Cathedral Speech will be released by Profound Lore on October 2nd.
https://linktr.ee/spiritpossession
https://spiritpossession.bandcamp.com/album/cathedral-speech
SKELETAL SERPENT (UK)
And to close, we have the continued re-emergence of the UK band Skeletal Serpent. They released a self-titled debut EP in 2018 and then, after an 8-year silence, Skeletal Serpent returned this past May as the solo project of Andy Kang with a demo song called “Ritual of the Living Seal” which I charaterized here as “the stuff of nightmares”. Now another demo track has surfaced.
This one, “Serpentagram“, is a re-recording of one of the songs from that 2018 EP. This time Andy Kang performs the harsh vocals instead of former member Richard Weeks, and it also includes fantastic female vocals by Cat Raai. It is dedicated “In loving memory of Shaun Glass and Mike Browning“.
The song is in part a menacing mangler. The riffing is like a nest of snarling vipers that brandish metallic scales. The drums clobber and clatter, and the distorted riffing gnashes and ravenously surges, ugly and flooding with venom, but pierced through with a lead-guitar that sounds like some quivering phantom made of gleaming diamond capable of cutting us open.
The vocals may be even more hostile than the music, delivering a monstrous amalgam of hideous growls, hungry snarls, and werewolf howls. And those horrors, on top of the livid nightmares roaming the music, just make a subsequent change even more surprising — a change in which the music transforms into drifting sonic wisps, classical piano chords, ghostly and pure female vocals, and a few febrile gasps.
The change creates a moving and haunting dream, a downcast and heartbreaking but still spellbinding experience, one amplified by the shimmering tones of orchestral strings. The shift from how the song began could hardly be more dramatic. Either side of the song would win out by itself; both together are stunning.
https://skeletal-serpentband.bandcamp.com/album/serpentagram-demo
https://linktr.ee/Skeletal_Serpent