SHADES OF BLACK: ОБРІЙ (OBRIJ), LHAÄD, FAUSTIAN SPIRIT, KOLDBRANN, TYHJÄ , ANONYMOUS SKULL

(written by Islander)

My computer tells me that my introduction to yesterday’s roundup of new music and videos was 1,502 words long. I obviously had too much time on my hands, though I don’t know why I spent it doing all that sharing instead of covering more music. But don’t worry, I won’t do that again today. Today’s introduction is 47 words long:

I’ve alternated today’s selections between complete albums or EPs and individual songs from forthcoming records. Apart from that, there’s no rhyme nor reason in how I organized the choices. I made these choices because, to quote the English poet William Cowper, “Variety’s the very spice of life.”

 

ОБРІЙ (OBRIJ) (Ukraine)

Unless you slept through the last 48 hours you’ll understand why Ukraine is on my mind again. I would have included the just-released new album by Обрій in today’s collection even if they were from Missouri, but I’m leading with their album because I’m so horrified and ashamed by our current administration’s fast-track abandonment of Ukraine and their embrace of the invader.

It’s obvious that our president has no idea who Neville Chamberlain was and no knowledge of the 1938 Munich agreement he signed with Hitler, declaring it the assurance of “peace in our time,” while giving Germany the green light to invade and occupy Czechoslovakia.  The new album by Обрій provides another relevant reminder about history’s lessons. Entitled Йосип (Joseph), it is about the horrors perpetrated by Stalin during his dictatorship of the Soviet Union:

The idea for “Joseph” was conceived before the full-scale Russian invasion. The aggressive rhetoric of the northern neighbor, imperialism draped in the red garments of Soviet nostalgia, was accompanied by the resurrection of the cult of Joseph “Koba” Dzhugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin. “Joseph” explores the crimes of Stalin and the Soviet government against their own people. These crimes destroyed the lives of millions, yet those responsible never faced their own Nuremberg trial.

In previous new music roundups I’ve already paid attention to two of the singles released in advance of the album’s release — “Сад Гетсиманський (The Garden of Gethsemane)” and “Жовтий князь” (The Yellow Prince)“. If I wrote as much about each of the other six songs on the album today, I’m afraid I would induce sleeping sickness among our readers. Here’s a more concise take:

As you might expect, this is angry music, and sorrowful music, and Обрій channel both with passion. In its fury, the music is devastatingly heavy and hard-charging, bone-breaking and scything, fronted by tormented gang cries and raw howls from a throat on the verge of splitting apart. In genre terms it’s mainly a head-hooking amalgam of bounding, chainsawing, and crusty death metal of the Swedish school — heavy-grooved, HM-2-toned, and sometimes laced with spitfire soloing and d-beats — and with ingredients of hardcore in the mix as well.

In its sorrow, the music slows and brings in crawling and wailing melodies of agony and grief, of suffocating gloom and ghastly death. And while even those episodes are crushingly heavy and punishing, the album also includes a soft and terribly sad piano instrumental (“День М (M-Day)“) that crackles as if an old record player were playing an old piece of vinyl.

Throughout, the drumming is superb, and those raw, inflamed vocals are always striking and distinctive in their tortured tones.

I know I’m going outside the usual focus of this column, but I just didn’t want to wait for another occasion to back this record.

https://obrij.bandcamp.com/album/joseph
https://www.facebook.com/obriymetaluzh

 

LHAÄD (Belgium)

Now I’ll get back inside this column’s usual boundaries (expansive though they are), and turn to the first song released from a new album by the Belgian black metal band Lhaäd.

“Beyond III” is a truly ravishing experience. It’s often blazing and expansive in its sweep but threaded with whirring melodies that create sensations of tension and torment, as well as elegant spectral melodies that seem to channel fear and distress. The vocals are almost relentlessly wild and ferocious, and the music also fiercely attacks, but is never far away from wide-screen depictions of cataclysm.

When the vocals do change in the song’s final phase, uttering grim-sounding spoken words (in a language Lhaäd has invented), the music also changes, slowing and becoming saturated with moods of heart-breaking grief, but still portrayed on a vast scale.

The new album, Lhaäd‘s third, is named Beyond. (Sadly, I’ve read that it may be the band’s final album.) It will be released by Amor Fati Productions and Extraconscious Recordings on April 19th.

https://shop.amor-fati-productions.de/en/
https://amorfatiproductions.bandcamp.com/
https://thenoxentity.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/thenoxentity

 

FAUSTIAN SPIRIT (Chile)

Now I’ll turn again to a complete record, an album named The Flaming Sword of Ater Ignis by the Chilean occult black metal band Faustian Spirit. In this case I’m departing from my usual habit of focusing on either very recently released or forthcoming records, though this one’s not that old: Faustian Spirit independently released it in late December of last year. But it is now set for a vinyl release by Inferna Profundus Records on March 15th, and the news of that is what led me to give it a listen. Here’s how that label has described the album:

Faustian Spirit has unchained their sophomore album, The Flaming Sword of Ater Ignis, which keeps with the tragic melodic tremolo triumph of previous incantations and slashes an ever darker wounds of epic spell composition, gothic organ passages, blistering blast beat percussion, orthodox Black Metal foundation, captivating grandiosity and melancholic atmospherics.

In line with the description, Faustian Spirit provide a central place for melody in their compositions, but the mood of the melodies is mostly very dark and usually voiced by unearthly guitars that feverishly quiver, as if infected with disease, or ring out like the glittering of warped chimes. The moods are dismal and distraught, desperate or cruel, sinister or ferocious, yearning or grief-stricken. Occasionally, they are also gloriously exhilarating.

Everything dark about the music is made darker still by truly ugly and authentically diabolical vocals filled with grit that maliciously croak and scream as if being garroted. They only occasionally grant the listener a reprieve with solemn spoken words.

The memorable melodic riffing in the songs and their high-low harmonies (a mix of distorted bone-chewing rhythm guitars and shrill, piercing leads) are compelling, often spellbinding, and are the album’s greatest strength. Other strengths include dynamism in the songwriting and in the overall design of the album. Faustian Spirit deftly push and pull their music’s speed and intensity, sometimes moving like a funeral procession, sometimes erupting in blasting and burning tirades of violence, and sometimes marching in grand processions of frightening glory or cantering through dark woods.

They also bring in riffs that, while infernal in their atmosphere, draw from classic heavy metal traditions from the ’80s or earlier. “Crepusculum Portis” is a great example of that, and the song is also home to striking (and ethereal) melodies and haunting organ accents, along with those infectious riffs — and a dose of blasting for good measure.

The band’s use of the organ accents across the album is artfully chosen rather than domineering. Also artfully chosen is the placement near the end of the title song of an elegant piano melody.

There aren’t any weak tracks here, and none you want to forget. Both individually and collectively the songs create a powerful nightside atmosphere, and succumbing to it is very easy.

https://infernaprofundusrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-flaming-sword-of-ater-ignis
https://www.ipr666shop.com/
https://faustianspirit.bandcamp.com/

 

KOLDBRANN (Norway)

Now back to an individual song. This one, “Elevert Hinsides Tilstand” (“Elevated Beyond State”), first appeared as a bonus track on the CD edition of Koldbrann‘s latest album Ingen Skånsel, released last August by Dark Essence Records. A couple of days ago the song was given a digital and streaming release.

In making this new release, Koldbrann dedicated the song to the memory of Trånn Ciekals (1978-2025), mastermind of Djevel, and a long-time close friend of the band. The dedication makes sense when you hear the song. It’s somber and stricken, with chiming notes slowly ringing above moaning tones and a scratchy, crackling base. When the drums come in, they slowly boom, like the accompaniment to a bleak ceremony.

The music swells; the snare cracks as the timpani booms; the bass offers a sad remembrance; but the chime-like guitar sounds even more abysmally grief-stricken. No vocals in this one, and it’s probably apparent why the song was only a bonus for the album, but it’s still captivating. And it gives you a chance to catch your breath before what comes next in today’s column.

https://koldbrann.bandcamp.com/album/elevert-hinsides-tilstand
https://www.koldbrann.net/
https://www.facebook.com/koldbrannofficial

 

TYHJÄ (Finland)

The last time I wrote about Tyhjä was a breathless review of their 2019 debut album Tästä Kuolevasta Maailmasta. Regrettably I didn’t spill any words about a subsequent demo or their next album Valtakunta (2022). Thanks to a very encouraging tip from Rennie Resmini (starkweather), I’ve learned that they just released a third album (-III-). I’m again left breathless.

The spacey ambient “INTRO” track is the only time in the album when you’ll have any chance to meditate on what you’re hearing, though even that track includes some crazed utterances and cries and some needling chords that you should take as a warning. After that, Tyhjä gradually build up like thunderheads and then loose the storms.

The storms deluge the listener with berserk screeching, maniacally roiling and viciously swarming riffage, frantic but fluidly bubbling bass lines, and snare beats that are both whip-like and hurtling. But the riffs and the equally manic leads bring big melodic hooks. The vocals, the timbre of the riffing, and the blast-beat bursts have kinship with raw black metal, but the melodic currents distinguish this from that.

Those currents are powerful and penetrating, indeed like rapidly rolling storms but more like sweeping ice-storms than deluges — blinding and dangerous ice-storms that would seem to white-out the landscape, frightening and electrifying. If the album were nothing but that, it would still be tremendous, but it’s not all like that.

In “PYHÄT SODAT“, for example, the music slows and transforms. With help from a piano, it becomes dreamlike and entrancing, even though the abrasive chords are still there, like something hungry circling your nighttime campfire in the shadows while you’re lost in thought. In “SURUN SILPOMA MAAILMA” they shift to a rocking groove, and create a sinister musical spell before uncaging a thrusting and thrashy riff. And after “AZOVSTAL” mounts one of the most violently delirious and exhilarating attacks on the album, the band layer in a slowly drifting melody that flows in waves, and then they drift away into a gorgeous bit of pastoral panorama.

In the final three songs Tyhjä follow suit, adding different and often fascinating facets to their compositions (many of them created with glimmering synths and ringing keys, and some of them atmospherically futuristic), and cementing the idea that these people are excellent songwriters and capable of doing even more than unleashing killer riff-blizzards and penetrating melodies.

Rennie Resmini commented to me that this album is “probably the best recording these guys have landed yet.” I wholeheartedly agree.

https://tyhj.bandcamp.com/album/iii
https://www.facebook.com/tyhjband/

 

ANONYMOUS SKULL (Canada)

Following today’s pendulum swing I would close with another individual song, but I’ve actually got two of them, both of them named in the title of a new Anonymous Skull EP, By My Hand, With Fervour Infinite. I discovered this one through Neill Jameson’s latest “Noise Pollution” column at Invisible Oranges, in which he wrote “this will probably be my favorite EP of 2025 and the year’s still very young.”

The first song, “By My Hand“, is an eccentric amalgam of strange electronics, eerily wailing melody that resembles a distorted flute or fiddle or accordion, stalking and stomping beats, deep, ragged snarls, and harrowing screams. It’s hallucinatory and seductive, but dangers lurk in the background — and come to the foreground when the double-bass thunders and the riffing uncoils, scathing the senses but with something like the moaning peals of a dismal siren in the mix. Still strange at the end, the music brings its folkish ingredients forward again and becomes wistful, even beautiful.

“With Fervor Infinite” is just as multi-faceted as the first song. The scratchy riffing here is both menacing and broken, but also frantic and fierce. Those two states trade places for a while, as do variations in the thumping rhythms, but the music also seems to swing and whirl, like music for witches and warlocks deliriously hurling themselves arm-in-arm around a bonfire. And suddenly and starkly, the music shifts again, creating another strange and scary hallucination of sizzling, gleaming, and contorting sound.

The EP is being released on 7″ vinyl by Ixiol Productions. I won’t soon forget it.

https://www.ixiol.com/
https://www.instagram.com/askull001/