This Hungarian black metal band does a great job of incorporating folk elements without brightening their sound or making them sound like Summoning, which would also brighten their sound. They allow for a dynamic ebb and flow as the gaze deeply into the woods and invoke the spirits of their ancestors. They do use some of the more common place sonic tropes of black metal like the tremolo picked guitar. Sometimes the dynamic swells they employ use the half time feel that black gaze bands like Alcest and Deafheaven made popular in the genre. The vocals are snarled with conviction and tend to lean more on the lower side without being death metal.
"Enter the Storm" is really well written and shows that blast beats alone do not a good song make. Not to say that blast beats are not a tool in their tool box, it is just not ones. These guys find a good balance between creating a sound, while still being song focused. Sung female vocals float in on "Ashes Remain". They work on a soft to loud formula most of the time which is still effective. The use of the folk metal intervals is also present but are not done with more glee than gloom. "Saka' soars along the normal places for black metal of this ilk. The real difference is rather than post rock passages to boreal things up, the turns the songs take towards proggy folk.
The last song is an instrumental that sounds like the kind of music you might here while you were waiting to get a massage. So for the point of this review, I am not going to factor it in when it comes to scoring this album. For this reason I will give this album a 9, as what they do on the last piece might have been interesting to have heard those more melodic sounds worked into the existing body of work presented here. This is very well done and impressive considering this is a one man band. This did what Blackbraid wanted to do better.
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