Lhaäd spawns from darkness with its first album.
Recently formed in Belgium by Lykormas (all instruments/vocals, Entartung, Hemelbestormer, Rituals of the Dead Hand, Wolven, ex-Gorath), the project unveils Below, its first album, at Babylon Doom Cult Records, Extraconscious Records and Fólkvangr Records.
The album is composed of six songs of pure blackness entitled Below. On the first one, we have a horrific sample followed by Old School influences which offer an ice-cold sound surmounted by ghostly howlings and dissonant leads, then the second track falls upon us with the same rage. We feel some impressive automatism into riffs, while howlings crush us. The sound wear suffocating tones with Industrial and Noise influences, then the rhythmic revives before the sinal, which gives birth to the dissonant third song. Fast and mechanic riffs invoke blackness through hooking patterns, allowing vocals to unveil screams of despair borrowed to DSBM, then the fourth composition reconnects with more raw and shrilling elements. A worrying and airy part comes to break the rhythmic, then it revives with soaring sonorities which turn to uncompromising bursts topped by cybernetic effects. We have those heady effects on the fifth song, which comes with a haunting dissonance as well as darker and more massive vocals supported by uninterrupted double kick. The sixth and last track offers hooking patterns on which raw vocals turn into howlings of despair. Languor lives into this song’s sound, also offering haunting parts and piercing leads before letting the void swallow the ghostly sound.
Both far and close to Black Metal clichés, Lhaäd finds its roots. Whether Below picks as much into Old School influences as to strange and Industrial sonorities, the sound perfectly builds itself into the style’s coldness.
80/100