“Black metal” is something you can use to generally describe newcomers Aldrig, as well as several combinations thereof with the “post” prefix, but as with some of the most exciting music that has appeared since we have exhausted existing genre names and somehow collectively lost the ability to make up new ones, that will only give you a very limited and reductive idea of what their debut album, Yağmur, sounds like. No, we’re not trying to start a campaign for a genre called “pain metal,” but if you want to throw a blanket term at it, then yeah, pain would be a much better one. All through the various distinct parts of the four long songs – plus one supremely creepy intro that sounds like a slowed down version Celtic Frost’s “Human (Intro)” and the vocals-only passages of My Dying Bride’s “She Is the Dark” being blended together – whether they’re being more doomy or atmospheric or slashing through with chilling tremolo-picking charges, the main component of it all is sorrow, anguish, pain.
Built around the core duo of Gert Stals and Joren De Roeck, both former members of Soul Grip members who call this debut album “by design, a vessel for grief,” this new Belgian band is one more name to consider in a scene that has already a fertile breeding ground for this kind of cathartic, emotionally intense sort of music for the last couple of decades at least. We are told that “lyrically the record follows a character falling through time and space, awakening in different urban dimensions over and over again, chasing something they can – and will – not ever find,” and as you will be able to listen in painfully clear detail, that infinite longing is something ever-present in every single note of Yağmur.
Yağmur is released on Thursday, November 23, via Wolves and Vibrancy on vinyl and digital formats.
“Walking through a city at night, while it’s raining, gives the world such a desperate glow. Streetlights and the surrounding industrial area’s reflect on the surface of dark clouds shaping a cold artificial sunset. It’s that emptiness that fueled the imagery in the lyrics on Yağmur,” Jeroen told us, and indeed there is something depressingly urban about this grey, permanent sadness on offer here. “Writing this record felt liberating, as if this burden of loss finally found a vessel,” he continues. “The imagery used in the lyrics really had to flow over into the artwork. Not coincidentally, both Julio and Lore were in my life when events took place that inspired writing this record. I think the record feels very complete in that way, and I hope it opens up a sort of portal for catharsis with the listeners. Listen to it loud and focused with a glass of red, or hell, have two.”