A softly picked acoustic guitar. Soft, airy whispers. No, this isn't some new ASMR YouTube channel; it's 'Memoir', the opening to Mirage, the latest album by mysterious Portuguese masked metallers Gaerea.
Eschewing immediacy for a far more cathartic build and release style of black metal, the anonymous outfit were beloved by the underground and became critical darlings more widely with 2018’s Limbo. The question of whether they can repeat history becomes a moot point, one entirely answered by the payoff from the aforementioned ‘Memoir’ when it explodes into blackened fury. Mirage is anything but; instead of dissolving to immateriality on closer inspection, it instead drags listeners down further into its depths to reveal new and more terrifying, but beautiful, forms.
On the surface, Mirage is a black metal album through and through; blastbeats, tremolo guitars and raspy vocals are all present and correct. But it’s those deeper layers, from right below the surface, that show just how densely packed and intricate it truly is. ‘Memoir’ is a post rock crescendo, ‘Salve’ brings tortured melodies and cavernous howls together for a melodic black metal masterclass and ‘Deluge’ pushes and pulls violently like waves smashing against cliffs. This is all by track 3; there’s a further five (plus one bonus track if you’re lucky) to go, none of which drop the album’s quality below “great”.
It’s not unfair to call this a post metal album written by black metallers; in many ways it occupies similar sonic forms. From its longer form songs to the emotional spectrum it draws on, as well as its ebb and flow and command of dynamics. ‘Arson’, for instance, opens serenely before transforming the opening motif into explosive black metal, while a slower passage after the midway mark threatens to suffocate with its intensity. They don’t just know how to write great songs; they know how to make those songs sound enormous, too. The guitar tone feels weighty, while drums sound an encroaching war party and the vocals could strip paint. None of the elements are unbalanced, either. Gaerea space each part out, like the culmination of ‘Arson’ which sounds as expansive as the Great Plains.
Mirage, then, is anything but. At once commanding, beautiful and abrasive, it illuminates decadence and decline in cathartic, emotional black and post metal. Stirring, long form compositions have space to build from softer beginnings to explosive conclusions, while others like ‘Mantle’ roar out of the gates immediately with a no-holds-barred assault. Simply put, Gaerea have produced one of the year’s finest black metal albums, towering in its grandeur and uncompromising in its extremity, it still manages to be accessible and memorable. Limbo might have been great, but it’s clear now that the sky is the limit for the masked troupe.