So reads Ardwisur's Bandcamp bio: "Ardwisur Anahita is the Persian divinity of waters, the goddess of fertility, healing and wisdom. Words and sounds shall pray to the cosmic mother of oceans..." This Iranian one-woman project has outfitted itself with an auspicious companion in namesake and imagery, for listening to this album is like stargazing from the amniotic suspension of primordial waters. It is a tranquil but frighteningly deep sea of primeval darkness and divine light, one whose simplicity, conservative pacing, and reflexive melodies belie an understanding of where black metal and ambient music can find common ground in their representation of the fearsome numinous. The beauty of this new addition to the Ardawahisht Kollective towers above the supposed limitations of its minimal approach.

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Enigmatic Japanese cult band Corrupted have been lying beneath the radar for quite some time; since 2011’s Garten Der Unbewusstheit, there have been but a couple of EPs to show that the band still endure. However, these EPs have been more than mere extensions of the group’s earlier droning sludge doom albums; Mushikeras demonstrates a whole new side to Corrupted, one that is more ambient-minded, yet also more haunting and disquieting. Against a musical backdrop that evolves from melancholic jazz piano through to increasingly dense sludgy, droning distortion, driven by emphatic drumming, Corrupted induce anxiety in listeners with an array of unnerving vocal approaches. Eerie singing, bleak spoken word, hysterical utterances, and harrowing screams together turn an already ominous instrumental composition into a disturbing descent into the darkest regions of one’s inner psyche.

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Dead Neanderthals again expands into a temporary trio with the unlikely but proven addition of Skeletonwitch guitarist Scott Hedrick, who adds his guitars and some extra synths to the existing mesh of absorbing vibration. This double-Dutch freakout first gained notoriety as a jazz band (“jazz” here meaning virtually anything you want it to), but over the years they’ve caught our attention due to the increasing centrality of metallic drone to their noisy and unpredictable experiments. Specters is a fairly overt drone metal duology, crescendoing into one of Dead Neanderthals’ heaviest and most densely textured works; the mesmeric, repetitive, and anxiously paced emanations build on a constant undertow of active drumming and doomy guitars, with the threatening hum of synths ever-present in between. Specters is fairly compact for something so slow and heady, but it will make time disappear in the infinity of its cyclical grooves.

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The already-impressive Fvnerals took a giant leap forward on album number three, Let The Earth Be Silent, really extracting the full potential from their own unique blend of doom, post-rock, and dark ambient/drone. The latter arguably does most to shape the album’s soundscapes, with bleak, haunting atmospheres conjured by discordant drones, emphatic (and outstandingly produced) percussion, and enthralling vocal arrangements. Regular metallic eruptions of doomy distortion serve to extend the depth of the album’s bleak dynamic range, but even post-rock tremolos defy expectations; instead of adding levity or vibrancy, they only serve to turn the atmosphere even more disquieting. At times reaching levels of ritualistic darkness that evoke Schammasch’s tribal ambient explorations, Let The Earth Be Silent is a stunningly dynamic album that channels its myriad influences into a singular and exquisitely rendered vision.

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Three years is a pretty normal inter-release gap by most standards. For Mories, who has started recording six new albums since you started reading this sentence, letting a project linger unoccupied like that for so long is unthinkable. But Gnaw Their Tongues has been something of a flagship for him, so that absence was not one of abandonment but one of consideration. The Cessation Of Suffering is the highest peak GTT has summited for a long while, bringing the harsh noise to its most complimentary production to date and putting the electronics to work on horrifying hellscapes that seem hopeless and inescapable even by the project’s own standards. The use of keys adds a touch of grandeur that hasn’t graced Gnaw Their Tongues in a long time, while the relatively short and highly variegated tracks make the album flow engagingly through its many musical concepts. Listeners who have not yet experienced this project may not understand how harsh noise can be so emotional, but The Cessation Of Suffering is a personal journey as much as it is a wall of feedback.

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In one of the most surprising comebacks of the year, Khanate surprise-dropped To Be Cruel, their first album in more than a decade. This album is an hour's worth of suspense and horrifying tension, one where you're desperately hoping for a release of huge riffs, but that very tension is what To Be Cruel is all about: slow-dirge droning riffs, drumming that's especially meticulous by drone metal standards, yet all of it falls before how insanely bloodcurdling Alan Dubin's screams are. Vile, disgusting, unnerving, corrosive, torturous, and... cruel. It's so physical in how it unleashes terror through that very tension and the vocal performance.

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Well, we seem to be taking the title of this album as advice rather than as a warning, but hey, we’re humans – what were we going to do, choose something other than the worst possible future for ourselves and all future generations to come (all two or maybe three of them)? You could fill an album’s worth of time just listing all the terrible things that are going to happen to the planet in the relatively near future. Or you could provide an aural representation, as Kryatjurr Of Desert Ahd persist in doing: their specialty is black metal so grievously afflicted by desertification that it becomes more ambient echo than stabbing icicles. There are punishing blast beats and pain-wracked howls and acrid riffs being worked out here, but all behind an obscuring veil of storm clouds, muffled by encroaching tides, hushed away by eerie synths showing us the sounds of human society post-climate disaster. This is what it sounds like when black metal melts into a distant memory just like the glaciers.

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Límyte closes out a trilogy started by 2019's Horror Cósmyco and continued by last year's Abysmos. Split into two long, 18-minute tracks separated by a short interlude, there is a bit of distinct personality in each of the tracks, with "Límite" being more meditative and "Ruptura-Afuera" being more metal. Some of it is due to the band collaborating with Teitanblood's CG Santos, who contributed a skeleton of hurdy-gurdy and modular synths that the band built upon to create an ominous and often formless, but those are joined by strings and theremin and percussion and Lord knows what else, something that even with the very patient and slowly building sound can create an air of intensity within the sound.

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The brainchild of Newcastle’s Daniel Foggin, Smote explores the overlap between drone, folk, and rock in a way that very few artists have previously. Names such as Mamiffer and especially Om may come to mind when listening to Genog, particularly on the later tracks as the musical soundscape turns more metallic and ritualistic, but Smote’s music is just as compelling when Foggin is more overtly exploring his passion for traditional British and Irish folk music; to hear flutes and other woodwind instrumentation dancing around atop steadfast percussion and ominous drones takes one’s mind right towards the kind of deep-seated unease that makes folk horror cinema so captivating.

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The death-doom of Sol’s early recordings has long since disappeared in the rear view mirror, as project mastermind and multi-instrumentalist Emil Brahe has subsequently explored drone doom, neofolk, and classical music. Promethean Sessions, Sol’s debut on I, Voidhanger Records, saw Brahe recruit a litany of orchestral instrumentalists and vocalists to render a unique vision, one that dips its toes into progressive folk, later-Earth psychedelic rock, and noise rock while remaining rooted in drone and doom. At different times, Promethean Sessions can be sparse and unnerving, dense and trudging, or grandiose and angelic; crafted over almost a decade of writing and recording, this album is a fascinating testament to Brahe’s creativity.

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