Hello, friends. It’s been a while since we whisked you along the icy plains of black metal madness. But here we are again to bring the pain. It’s Kvlt Kolvmn, baby. Let’s go.
The last few months have been particularly busy/stressful for me as I dealt with a house sale and various other personal calamities, and black metal has been a particular balm to my beleaguered brain. It’s been a pretty banger first quarter of 2025, and we hope you find something here to feast on.
Partake and enjoy. As always, stay frosty.
-Jonathan Adams
Winter’s Crown
Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power
Deafheaven are one of those bands where I genuinely could not care less what other people think about them. They exist outside of the zeitgeist for me, having touched such personal depths for me through their music that the don’t even seem to live on the same plane as many of my other favorite bands. So I approach this review fully admitting my emotional biases. This is not an impartial social/musical critique. It’s another burst of admiration for a band I deeply adore, and a celebration of what is undoubtedly their best and most powerful record behind only Sunbather.
For a band that’s covered as much sonic ground as Deafheaven, it’s interesting to see them pull back into more recognizable territory after their boldest statement to date. While Infinite Granite stands tall on its own merits as a shoegaze record, it certainly toned down the blackened elements that have become the band’s signature metallic calling card. LPWP brings back that particular heat in a BIG way, with tracks like “Doberman” and “Magnolia” dropping some of the band’s most aggressive riffage to date, the latter in its middle section hitting “Black Brick” levels of chug.
While coming back to the heaviness the band gained so many followers developing was certainly a bold and smart strategy, but the melodic and emotional highs they have historically been able to reach are still the reason Deafheaven sticks out amongst their peers, and LPWP helps continue making that abundantly clear. The forlorn reverb of “The Garden Route,” the explosive release of “Heathen,” and the splendor of album highlight “Winona” are all examples of what make Deafheaven such a special entity to begin with. The band has never lost its sense of sonic grandeur or lyrical wonder, and it’s in a host of moments sprinkled throughout this outing that we once again see and feel the personal core of Deafheaven… and those moments will be different for everyone, but for me are ultimately sublime.
Poetic, nuanced, at times merciless, deeply melodic, and compositionally epic, LPWP is a return to form that has to be counted among the best I’ve heard in recent memory. There isn’t a dud on the record, and I cannot stress how truly magnificent its highest highs are. I may be a fanboy, but I know quality when I hear it and here the boys are definitely back in the saddle. A borderline masterpiece of atmoblack goodness I cannot recommend highly enough.
-JA
Best of the Rest
Ahamkara- The Harrow of the Lost
Does Panopticon’s Austin Lunn still require introduction? The reclusive, visionary Rocky Mountain magician is still steadily pumping out Appalachian Black Metal under the aforementioned moniker.
That (of course) isn’t all he’s up to. Lunn also plays drums in Cascadian black metal band Ahamkara. On their latest foray into the untamed wilderness, the band cut up a little over 40 minutes into four long and sweeping compositions.
Melodic and atmospheric guitar parts prevail over icy tremolo riffing on The Harrow of the Lost, drawing some comparisons to Falls of Rauros, Ashbringer and of course Panopticon (minus the Appalachian folk).
Austin Lunn handles the drumming on this one, and is once again a crashing force of nature. His tom-heavy, idiosyncratic black metal drumming holds a special place in my blackened heart, and every time the playful, tumbling fills deluge like a great waterfall I am reminded of the first time I heard Roads to the North and was blown off a sheer cliff and soared. With the cascading water. Cascadian indeed.
Ahem. Back to the album at hand. The production (although treble heavy as is the norm in most black metal) is quite clear, the drums and guitars sound great, and the vocals do the expected raspy thing without much bells and whistles. This one is really all about the guitar melodies, the drumming, and the atmospheric compositions. I hope you like those as much as I do.
-Boeli Krumperman
Felgrave - Otherlike Darknesses
It seems like the last few years have brought a growing interest in certain metal circles for maximalism. Moving away from, or even reacting to, the fashion of very rarified and melodic black metal on one side and the cavernous sludge of lo-fi black metal on the other, we’ve seen plenty of black metal acts embrace a defiant sort of melodic maximalism. What the hell am I talking about? Just press play on Felgrave’s Otherlike Darknesses to find out. You’ll find an album that is unwilling to be pegged down, channeling both a twisted sort of melodic approach and a full throttle, everything louder than everything else maximalism.
At the core of the album is the twisting, “spidery” riff, the constantly unwinding and rewinding black metal sound that has been associated with the avantgarde sub-genre for a while now. But you’ll find no corresponding theatrics; instead, Otherlike Darknesses supports this sort of riff with...everything else. The drums are in constant motion; the harsh vocals are grandiose and omni-present and cleans erupt from their darkness every once in a while, like a star drowning in night. There are very few pauses - all of these elements are constantly crashing upon you, aided by the fact that the album is divided into three, very long tracks. In a sense, all of this builds up to the classic black metal emotional palette - antipathy, un-humanity, something dark, and cold, and “outside”.
You might like this (I do). You might not. You might find it challenging; it’s certainly an album that takes a lot of time to parse and even longer to orient yourself around. But there is so much to appreciate here, real, deep musicianship that is powering the whole thing. This is not just noise for noise’s sake (which is also fine in some contexts, to be clear) but rather an ambitious and unique vision that simply requires all of this instrumentation to be fully depicted. If that appeals to you, the deep dive into a version of the world that is so idiosyncratic that an album this weird and overwhelming needed to be made to convey it, then this is the album for you. It’s one of 2025’s most challenging and, as a result, most rewarding.
-Eden Kupermintz