If you’ve heard the first single released from Altar Ov Asteria‘s debut album you know these two German women (Satyra and Melpomene) aren’t cautiously feeling their way forward, haltingly trying to figure out who they are musically. They named that song “Kataklysm“, and a sonic cataclysm is what they made — a devastating, exhilarating, and wholly engulfing experience.
The rest of the album, entitled Éna, is equally self-assured, both in its music and in its conception. Altar Ov Asteria liken it to “a storybook of hellish Sodom”, imagining (as Dante and Homer did) “a world full of mysteries and realities woven into each other”, creating allegories of human dystopia through an intertwining of viscerally assaulting, immensely heavy black metal and unorthodox atmospherics.
What we have for you today is the premiere stream of Éna as a whole, all five songs, in advance of its release by the Dusktone label on November 29th.
The dark and harrowing atmospheres that Altar Ov Asteria create aren’t separate components patched into the music (like some bands use synths to do), but are part and parcel of what frequently makes the music so astonishingly vicious. That quickly becomes clear in the opening song, “Arroganz“.
There, Altar Ov Asteria greet the listener with sensations that are both frighteningly ominous and crazed. They create shuddering subterranean upheavals and dense swaths of dismal and demented razor-like chords, caustic in tone and malicious in intent, interspersed with immense, pounding jolts and furious cut-throat howls. The jolts themselves become more maniacal, and the riffage even more twisted and sadistically jubilant as the underground earthquakes continue.
They follow this with “Fegefeuer“, whose haunting acoustic melody, howling winds, and spoken-word sample (which sounds lifted from an old radio broadcast) create a sudden contrast with the opening track’s furious conclusion. A woman’s adamant voice fervently joins in, building the intensity toward another episode of siren-like guitars miserably wailing in the upper reaches as titanic low-frequency movements begin shaking the foundations apart.
Rabid, unhinged howls take over the words, issuing unhinged proclamations; the piercing riffage writhes like god-vipers, poisonous yet glorious; the drums batter and eventually blast; throbbing waves of sound sweep forward, spreading agony, and in their midst a merciless pounding ensues.
The album flows right into the hopeless opening melody of “Hesperus“, which is shattering in the bleakness of its distress. Periodically, the riffing becomes even more tormented and the rhythmic destructiveness even more intense, but the band also bring in feverish throbbing tones and blaring bursts as a prelude to a whirling and writhing cyclonic sonic blaze undergirded by extravagantly bludgeoning grooves and fronted by the voice of a maddened beast.
Then comes “Kataklysm” with its own terrors, advanced by horn-like fanfares. The rhythms again rumble the earth and pound like industrial-strength pile-drivers, and the riffing again expels shrill, siren-like wails of impending devastation and agony that spiral around that tumult, along with further bursts of bestial snarls and deranged screams. Perhaps unexpectedly, a feeling of shattering poignancy, a kind of intense yearning, develops in the way the piercing melodies flow — until the music transforms into a mad convulsion of torment and brutality.
And at last comes “Pilatus“. Just because it’s the end doesn’t mean that Altar Ov Asteria relent. They again storm and slaughter, inflicting behemoth-sized undulations and ramming in the low end and spraying emotional napalm in the upper reaches.
But actually they do relent. About three minutes in they revisit their acoustics, tracing slow, glimmering, tones. Near-gasping words reverberate through the melody’s glistening but sorrowful elegance and subdued beats, and become more distressed, as does the music.
Of course the band don’t end things that way. Suddenly, the song assaults the senses again, rendering sensations of end-times pain over a primitive, pounding beat — one last successful effort to leave the listener’s eyes bulging wide and their spines shivering.
Dusktone will release Éna on CD and all digital platforms on November 29th. They highly recommend it to fans of such bands as Aara, Blut Aus Nord, and Lunar Aurora. And before the links we’ll leave you with this comment from the band:
Éna takes you on a journey into darkness and transformation, fusing black metal’s unrelenting ferocity with haunting avant-garde atmospheres. This is ALTAR OV ASTERIA’s sacrifice to the world — chaos reshaped into creation. Each track reflects a part of our being: blistering rage balanced with an experimental, intimate atmosphere. Éna was crafted to embrace you in its shadowed, sonorous domain. Join us as we step into the other realm.
PRE-ORDER:
https://dusktone.bandcamp.com/album/na
https://www.dusktone.org/band/altar-ov-asteria/
ALTAR OV ASTERIA:
https://www.facebook.com/altarovasteria/
https://www.instagram.com/altar_ov_asteria/
https://altarovasteria.bandcamp.com