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. Continue reading »