One of my favourite parts of listening to new metal releases is the discovery of artists whom I find to be doing something truly new and unique. By chance I discovered the latest release from Great Cold Emptiness, whose third full-length album was appropriately released in the coldest days of winter in 2023. It shouldn’t at all be surprising to anybody then, that a band with this name (and coming from St Agatha, Maine no less) would be in the business of making frigid and desolate atmospheric black metal.

Those already familiar with the genre will find this to be strongly reminiscent of Ethereal Shroud’s They Became the Falling Ash, albeit with much more musical licence taken to explore well beyond the traditional confines of the genre. Indeed, the harmonic colours used throughout are eerily similar to those used by shoegaze bands like Nothing and Whirr. Every track has portions which are dominated by non-guitar instruments, and some sections have the guitars removed entirely, resulting in a distant post-rock sound.

Nevertheless, the motion of this album is still driven almost entirely by the guitar melodies, which form the distant and despondent riffs – which are somehow consoling and comforting at the same time. But it’s not just the tremolo guitar that gives this album its character. “To Die for the Ideal” starts with a haunting Lydian piano riff before exploding into the main portion of the song which is littered with subtle time changes and massive swings in mood and dynamics. “She Sang for Hyperborea” contains a dreamy psychedelic interlude that possesses nearly preternatural beauty. And the oddest of all the musical adventures here occurs at the end of the final track, where all pretence of being metal is jettisoned entirely as the song shifts abruptly into a bizarre dance beat for the remainder of the piece. Now metal artists mix in other genres of music often enough, but this is incongruous enough that it’s bound to rub some listeners the wrong way. For my part, I had no issue with it as I’m a bit of a techno/trance lover myself but metal purists should be forewarned if they have any deep-seated hatred for electronic dance music and might suffer from a traumatic brain injury if it makes an unexpected cameo in a metal album.

Though the album is only four songs long, each song is a journey all to itself. As such, there are no hits; no filler tracks. The album simply must be taken as a whole, and each song is incomplete without the others. It is an album full of colour and depth, and the raw emotion that bleeds from this release is of a level not often encountered in the vast world of metal. Instead of relying solely on reverb and studio tricks to create the soundscape, what we have here is a collection of well-crafted and pensive compositions, woven together into a beautiful tapestry brimming with the full experience of humanity, good and evil, joy and sadness, connection and alienation.