Awaking Mechanon

A split of post black metal that sees Hænesy bookend the EP, with Autumn Nostalgie filling out the middle. This only serves to further expose the stark contrast in how each artist treats their self-appointed roles as the advancing army of black metal’s creative front.

Autumn Nostalgia play a vacuously bland variant of stadium rock with all the jeopardy of a Coldplay album. The riffs are obvious and flat, cycling around the most simplistic anthemic hooks imaginable, utterly failing to express a statement that could even approach the trivial. Drums plod beneath, rarely deviating from a lacklustre 4/4. This in itself would be forgivable. But considering the drivel this percussion is put in service of it could at least make a show of raising the stakes beyond the boiler plate fills served up here. In the space of sixteen minutes Autumn Nostalgie manage to showcase all the worst aspects of post black metal (post Deafheaven), and its insistence on taking one of the most creatively fertile pockets of contemporary music and appropriating it back into the tedium of business-as-usual culture industry cliché, neutering it with commonplace musical forms that have defined Western pop and rock since the 1950s.

Ok, now that’s out of our system.

Hænesy continue their unique and eerie brand of atmospheric black metal expressed via predominantly clean guitars lifted straight from goth and jangle pop. Here the delicate arpeggios are lent muscle through a strong bass tone and underlayers of distorted rhythm guitar. This, strictly speaking, sits within the post metal milieu for its foregrounding of sparsity, atmosphere, minimalism, and catharsis.

But this is a superficial reading. Beneath the surface level tranquillity the music is rife with activity. Novel narrative developments play out atop proto contrapuntal melodic lines that constantly flow and build to moments of release. Rhythmic diversity aides in this endeavour by adopting a subtle progressive flavour. When not engaged in lightning fast blast-beats the drums weave and flow between the multifaceted guitar work.

Hænesy blend moments of abrasive anguish with the cold comfort of richly realised guitar lines to great effect, never tipping over into overworked sentiment, never sacrificing compositional integrity for the sake of an atomised, individualistic expression. This is music that sees tight writing and carefully curated atmospheres meet for the betterment of both. Fixed on the heavens, hampered by the earth, Hænesy restate their claim as one of the more unique voices within extreme metal in the 2020s.

Originally published at Hate Meditations