It took less than a year for Austere to create again.
In 2024, Desolate (guitar/bass/keyboards/vocals, Temple Nightside, Unfelled, ex-Funeral Mourning…) and Sorrow (drums/keyboards/vocals, Autumn’s Dawn, Germ, ex-Lord…) give life to Beneath the Threshold, their fourth album, released by Prophecy Productions.
The lament begins with Thrall‘s soothing intro, which joins the heavier atmosphere and ghostly cries, letting the lead guitar to weave its heady melody. The rhythmic basis is relatively simple and regular, but it eventually welcomes a heavier double kick and some eerie clean vocals before the growls return to let us drift off into The Sunset of Life and its soaring Gothic accents. The two voices blend skilfully to bring to life the dissonant riffs that accompany us in this haunting progression with an epic touch, until the saving break that allows us to breathe before putting our heads back under water until Faded Ghost comes to envelop us in its ethereal notes. The clear vocals dominate this short track, giving it a certain lightness that fades with Cold Cerecloth, where the rhythm takes over again to develop its tenebrous veil, while screams are reborn to drape the composition in majestic, impressive darkness. Words Unspoken, the album’s shortest composition, offers us a vaporous instrumental pause before anchoring us once again in despair on Of Severance, which closes the album with a hazy sound in which we perceive a few softer harmonics that incite us to sink with the musicians into this opaque maze, abandoning our minds to the last notes of this long composition.
Austere’s magic has never disappeared, nor has the proximity of the two releases altered it – quite the contrary. Beneath the Threshold picks up where its predecessor left off to continue this mental stroll on the edge of darkness.
90/100