Artwork by: Benjamin König

Style: Atmospheric Black Metal, Doom Metal, Psychedelic Folk (Mixed vocals, mostly clean)
Recommended for fans of: Alcest, Myrkur, Opeth, Panopticon, Primordial, Ulver
Country: Finland
Release date: 13 June 2025

A fun fact about me: I love a fun ghost / skeleton / creepy homie on some cover art. The crimson bone-buddy getting his bask on fronting The Last Ten Seconds of Life’s Soulless Hymns, Revocation’s spoopy tomb gracing Deathless, The Tritonus SkeleBell dominating Hooded Menace’s sixth LP; each one factored heavily into my listening interest. For as much as the music has the final say, never, ever underestimate the power of an attention-grabbing album cover. Maybe it matters less these days with the popularity of auto-shuffles and (probably AI-generated) playlists, but for me, careening towards middle-age and still fond of making record store hauls, artwork is the first thing I experience before ever considering “play.” And the best artwork often tells us something about what we’re getting into, a sort of visual preview of the aural secrets about to be uncovered.

So, when Nocturne—the seventh release by Finnish atmoblack doomsters Hexvessel—was recommended to me, I took one look at the ghosty fellow casting the ol’ “spectral sprinkle” over that sleepy, snow-capped hamlet isolated amidst a moody charcoal expanse and knew I had to give the album my time. Unfamiliar with Hexvessel and their oeuvre but with all my folk / black metal radars going off, I was eager to see if Nocturne’s musical offerings proved as winsome as the endearingly dreary (endrearing?) artwork. Or would this zesty spectre leave me dusted with disappointment? Grab your soul salt shakers, and let’s have a taste, shall we?

What struck me almost immediately upon firing up Nocturne (aside from the frustratingly ubiquitous practice of pointless openers in metal—titled “Opening,” no less) was how interrelated the music and artwork feel. Songs roll over the horizon like ghostly clouds, sketched in rainy-day hazes of fuzzed guitars, sprinkling in delicately-plucked folk acoustics amidst the ebb and flow of roiling black metal tremolos and hail-storm blast beats. Glimmers of death-and-roll cut through the gray on tracks like “Inward Landscapes,” adding spurts of energy to the haunting, often funereal backdrop of wailing guitars, doleful bells, and ritual-esque timbre of vocalists Mat Kvohst McNerney and Saara Nevalainen. Baleful synths carve out images of forlorn worship houses from the formless charcoal landscape (“A Dark and Graceful Wilderness”), wherein one could imagine frightened villagers huddling, seeking some measure of safety as this leering spectre drifts, steadfast and resolute, across their homes—I’m reminded of Count Orlok’s shadow falling upon Wisborg in Robert Eggers’ Gothic masterwork, Nosferatu (2024). Supplying terror not through red-teethed violence, but rather via sheer enveloping presence.

There is a mournful, otherworldly quality to Nocturne’s atmospheric blackened folk, especially in softer cuts like “Concealed Descent,” where morose acoustic guitar and violin take center stage alongside McNerney’s wistful cleans. The paganic dirge of “Unworld,” with its lurching, Brave Murder Day-era Katatonia opening riff, chanted vocalizations, and smoky heft, constructs notions of grandeur in decay; this small storied town, perhaps built upon the bones of ancient edifices, sundered by slicing winds of black metal aggression amidst the deliberate marching of funeral doom aesthetics. By the time closer “Phoebus” blows through, there’s nothing left, our spectral harbinger having folded man’s scaffolding back into the architecture of the (other)natural world. In many ways, I’m brought to the doorstep of Panopticon’s folk / black metal crossroads, except replace twangy americana with the dreamy plucking that seems to signify Finnish folk,¹ then toss in some slow and dolorous doom vibes for added flavor. Hexvessel have set out with a particular sonic palette and aesthetic in mind, and they do nothing to disturb it across Nocturne’s near-hour of play.

Which brings us to perhaps my only true gripe about Nocturne: like Spectral Bae closing in to sprinkle the town with his damnedruff, Hexvessel’s assemblage of fuzzy, doomed-out atmoblack tunes have a tendency to drift across the consciousness. Multiple times, I lost track of where I was in the album, lulled by a particular folky moment or vibed-out bridge before being shocked back into awareness by one of McNerney’s intermittent harsh cries or an equally intermittent energetic drum run. Sometimes, I found myself halfway across the album; other times, still wrapped in the ashen folds of a longer thread (“Sapphire Zephyrs,” “Inward Landscapes,” “Mother Destroyer”). This makes the album something of an “easy” listen, a record to throw on and just chill out to, despite the large swaths of razoring guitars and blasting snares. Lacking measures of more “conventional” structures, this is hardly an album to inspire sing-alongs, or even headbanging. There are no real central riffs, no sense of verse-chorus-verse dynamics for a listener to grab on to. This lends Nocturne an organic quality, affording a pleasantness to the experience—a dream-like effect—even if I’m often left struggling to remember where I was in the aftermath. More mood-setting than neck-snapping.

Fans of groups like Enisum, or fellow Prophecy partners Ceresian Valot will certainly find much to enjoy about Nocturne. Hexvessel thrum with the kind of naturalism that tends to lurk, perhaps overlooked, in black metal; everyone remembers the church burnings, the edginess, but this genre has been more than religion-bashing, murder, and hate crimes across its many storied decades. Nocturne, with its gloomy moods and pagan, almost druidic nature vibes, represents one of my favorite breeds of black metal. More about the journey than any singular sonic destination, Hexvessel’s latest may struggle to maintain my full attention at times, but there’s something to be said for the kind of album you can just… float away on. A fine dusting, indeed.

Recommended tracks: Unworld, Phoebus, A Dark and Graceful Wilderness
You may also like: Blood Ceremony, Ceresian Valot, Enisum, Nechochwen, Wolvennest
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: Prophecy Productions – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Hexvessel is:
– Mat Kvohst McNerney (vocals, guitars, songwriting)
– Kimmo Helén (piano, keyboards, strings, guitars)
– Jukka Rämänen (drums, percussion)
– Ville Hakonen (bass)
With guests:
– Aleksi Kiiskilä (lead guitars)
– Saara Nevalainen (female vocals)
– Yusaf Vicotnik Parvez (lead vocals, “Unworld”)
– Juho Vanhanen (backing vocals, “Phoebus”)

1.  Assuming Finnish folk sounds like the kind Finnish metal bands employ. ︎

The post Review: Hexvessel – Nocturne appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: psychedelic folk (mostly instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Natural Snow Buildings, Lula Côrtes, The Gerogerigegege, Paul Konoplenko-Zaporozetz
Country: Ukraine/United States-OR
Release date: 25 October 2024

Over the past decade, Markov Soroka has progressed from a young Ukranian metal prodigy into a multi-project (Tchornobog, Aureole, Slow) titan of strange metal, showing Soroka clearly possesses a beautifully twisted imagination. I was lucky enough to catch Tchornobog at Soroka’s farewell show from his temporary residence in St. Louis, and nothing quite prepared me for the vomit ritual and blindfolded playing¹. They were a paragon of stage presence, and the live painting session—as in Soroka had a local artist create a work as the music played using the paint they vomited up—during the set only added to the genius charm. With that live performance scarred into my brain, I understand why he was commissioned to perform live at Eilish Gormley Art’s exhibit “Magic Mirror Magic Mirror Help! Get Me Out of Here”; Soroka’s aura and dedication to his craft (as well as his synesthesia playing a role in his unique creationary process) is fitting for the high art world even unattached from metal. That live set constitutes the second half of this weighty release, the first “commissioned” to commemorate a friend’s trip through the Balkans. These two commissions are starkly different from Soroka’s other works, so do they stand up to his metal genius?

The first half of the album, Kobza Bizarre’s Travel Loops of Static Broken Dialogues, guards the border of consciousness and unconsciousness. In its liminality, one can feel Soroka’s questing to reach his friend, trying to bypass boundaries of space and time. Each of the four tracks crests eleven minutes and once it finds its groove, never relents its pulsating, hypnotic grip. These are palates of musical texture for timbre and form more than traditional “songs,” unfurling contemplatively in order to allow the mind to explore vast internal soundscapes—seeking melodic or rhythmic variation would distract from the quest of stepping beyond temporal borders to the metaphorical Balkans. The long tracks will be frustratingly repetitive to most, but their unhurried dreaminess is gorgeous. To create these textures, Soroka focuses on a few instruments and tries to unlock the potential in what their simple repetitions can do: percussive bells, synths, and Ukrainian folk instruments like the double necked kobza and 55-string bandura. To get accustomed to the minimalist folk of twenty minute opener “NoClipping Sleepdreams of Abandoned Monastaries with Lovers’ Mothwings” is difficult and will require from most listeners a desire to achieve a meditative state, an openness to the flexibility of form which most music (even for prog metal fans) doesn’t challenge, yet its shamanic buildup is well worth it to the patient listener. The pulse is altered by backing synth melodies, occasionally the kobza and bandura pluck between the overwhelming onslaught of rhythm, and clipped voices take on hints of melody throughout. The other three tracks are similarly hypnotic and repetitive—although not identical in style as “Savehouse Spokiy Overlooks our Dreamsleep of Healthpoints” plays much more with a plodding dungeon synth-y backing—but the polyptych flows as one meditation in a satisfyingly brilliant manner.

What makes Soroka so unlike most other artists is surely informed by his monochromatic synesthesia: listening to music forms grandiose architectures and narratives in his mind. If you’ve followed along with the concepts of his Tchornobog and Aureole projects, this is an unsurprising revelation, but for those of you less familiar with his work: it is intensely story-driven and often more focused on texture than melody. This double LP pushes that to the extreme, though, and the lack of, well, anything except for hazy musical textures is confusing and difficult to grapple with, particularly for such an extended time. I’m sure Soroka’s amazing mind crafts a stunning artistic backdrop for this release, but me and my non-synesthete-ness get lost in the work far too easily. I still find it easy to drift away, but the piece is surely lacking the power it could have had I an extra sense. 

The side commissioned by Eilish Gormley’s, The Tzerkalocvyt Bandura of Kosmos, functions similarly to Kobza Bizarre’s Travel Loops of Static Broken Dialogues, albeit more actively. There’s a darker hue to the dreaminess, more sinister percussion (hear the second half of “Tzerkalocvyt I – Mountaintop Wind of Vaporware Downloads”). These tracks draw from a wider range of influence—particularly 90s PC game music and some gothic-ness—but I hear doom-y dungeon synth like Bakt and even some of the eerie folk music of Nishaiar infiltrate. The Tzerkalocvyt Bandura of Kosmos is as relaxing, beautiful, and strange as the first half.

Of course, paired together this release is over two hours of very repetitive psychedelic folk music, and it’s simply too much to stomach. It’s a lovely project to experience, letting the colors and forms and textures of the music wash over you, but it grows tedious quickly in nearly every listening context. While I appreciate tracks like “Tzerkalocvyt III – Narodivsya, 1995 Irregular Linedef” for the way it expands on themes in the previous Tzerkalocvyt movements, it wouldn’t exactly be great listening without a remarkably long attention span or with the genetic gift of synesthesia. Both his friend and Gormley undoubtedly hired the right person for the job, and Soroka is brilliant here, but it’s simply not a friendly album to listen to more than once in a blue moon.

Recommended tracks: The Tzerkalocvyt Bandura of Kosmos
You may also like: Nishaiar, Esoctrilihum, Bakt
Final verdict: 7.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: independent

Markovsoroka is:
– Markov Soroka (everything)

1.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcQUBlkXyo this is not the same performance, but Soroka does this live to start many Tchornobog concerts ︎

The post Review: Markovsoroka – Kobza Bizarre’s Travel Loops of Static Broken Dialogues & The Tzerkalocvyt Bandura of Kosmos appeared first on The Progressive Subway.