Recently from the murky underground Black Metal hotbed of Iceland, a murmur surrounding Hræ and its debut full length album has started reverberating. Let us see what this mysterious project has to offer. The debut full length is out now independently.
Ambient and discordant guitar riffs set the discomfortingly unhinged tone for the record with booming drums and viciously growled vocals. Convulsively reverberate dissonance twitches with disdain as the music transcends through eerie passages of blisteringly unnerving Black Metal atmospherics, but this is not a pleasant atmosphere, it is anguishing, rather like the fellow Icelandic Black Metallers Andavald. Scathingly cold and bleak, the hopelessness and anxieties that are conveyed in these tracks is tangibly pure while coupled with a ferociously aggressive approach. With excellent musicianship and a murky production, all the components of some truly astonishing Black Metal brilliance is here, glowing in the radiant aura of despair and depravity.
Hypothermic riffs and scolding drums march forth to unravel a dystopian soundscape that grows with a mutating life throughout the album, unfurling something decadently putrid among the dancing twirls of vindictive riffs and hammering blastbeats, accompanied by the tortured vocal howls that have become a staple part of the Icelandic sound much like the discourse of violently offset riffs. Surging through utter morbidity and with introspectively harsh soundscapes that truly rip you from your comfort zone, this is everything I hoped for from this project and more, delving into a chaotic yet strangely tranquil sense of hypnosis that feels more like an out of body experience than just a record. Unrelentingly profound and twisted, this is utterly amazing material that shall certain leave most people trembling with fear as the crushing might of its progressive experimentation and seething songwriting conjure a blackened flame of anguished malice, leaving nothing but a quivering husk in its wake.
While the structural oddities and meandering dissonant leads may give a false idea of lucidity, there are plenty of punishing assaults that make sure to keep things on a rivetingly obliterating path packed with grooves and captivating hooks throughout, some of the most purely magnificent material one could expect. Do not expect an easy listen or a pretty piece of atmospheric Black Metal, rather a sonically depraved, twisted and scathing slab of self-reflective disdain and while melancholic, do not be fooled, this record will rip you to shreds with its mighty aggressive touches and unhinged nuance. Iceland has done it again, putting their small country on the map as one of the finest pioneering forces in contemporary Black Metal. A totally astonishing, disfigured and purifying masterpiece of loathing, malignant extremity. -9/10
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