The Hermit Has No God: Interview with Mauna Sol
Romania’s Mauna Sol on “A New Life” and the secular desert at the heart of The Calling.
Category: Beyond the Doom
Exploring heavy genres and dark culture. The darkness remains; the style expands. Our space for all sounds that stand just beyond the slow riff
Review: Sisyphean – Divergence
Sisyphean’s third album funnels Camus, a medieval emperor’s epithet, and the psychology of manipulation into 42 minutes of dissonant black/death metal from Vilnius. Produced at Poland’s Hertz Studio, Divergence is the sharpest and most daring record yet from a band built around one guitarist’s twelve-year refusal to stop.
Review: Non Est Deus – Blessings and Curses
Noise, the anonymous German musician behind Kanonenfieber and Leiþa, returns with the fifth Non Est Deus full-length. Blessings and Curses is his most chaotic record yet: melodic black metal built for festival crowds that never loses the claustrophobia of a one-man operation, and an indictment of religious coercion that lets the scripture do the talking.
Review: The Ruins of Beverast – Tempelschlaf (2026)
Twenty-three years into one of extreme metal’s most uncompromising discographies, The Ruins of Beverast deliver Tempelschlaf: seven tracks of blackened doom that move closer to the live stage than anything von Meilenwald has attempted before, while remaining as resistant to easy interpretation as the oracular dreams the album takes its name from.
Beyond the Doom: Darvaza – We Are Him (2025)
Released in December 2025 through Terratur Possessions, We Are Him is a visceral reminder of what happens when black metal is played with genuine, predatory intent. Omega handles every instrument with a level of focused aggression that bypasses the typical lo-fi murk, opting instead for a production style that is punchy and massive.
De Mortem et Diabolum 2025: Personal Highlights
Another December in Berlin, another weekend spent hiding from the sleet inside the massive concrete shell of the ORWOhaus for De Mortem et Diabolum.
Beyond the Doom: Lamp of Murmuur – The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy (2025)
This newest album, The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy, is the synthesis of those extremes, a commandingly ambitious work that finds M. channeling the dark theatricality of the past while pushing the speed and grandeur established on the previous record.
Review: Der Weg einer Freiheit – Innern (2025)
Der Weg einer Freiheit return with their sixth full-length, released through Season of Mist. Across six albums, the Würzburg group have refined their own language within black metal. With Noktvrn (2021), they leaned toward nocturnal atmosphere and extended use of piano, pulling their writing closer to dream states. Innern moves in another direction, stripped down to fury and fragility, pushing deeper into the body.
Ghosts of Dinmin: A Black Metal Interlude in Demmin
From my own little doom metal universe, the two nights in Demmin felt less like stepping outside than walking a parallel path. Doom often reaches beyond place, carrying its gravity inward, into memory and mind. Black metal here tore the night open in frenzy, tied to the earth, to ruins and red brick, to the woods themselves. Different shades, but both speaking with ghosts, both turning music into ritual.