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.
The German musician known only as Noise has spent nearly a decade building a small empire of one-man projects, each locked to a single obsession. Kanonenfieber lives in the trenches of the First World War. Leiþa turns inward toward depression and self-destruction. Non Est Deus, the oldest of the three, trains its eye on organized religion, not as abstract critique but as lived experience, the grammar of guilt and grace that shapes a believer from the inside out.
Blessings and Curses, released April 3, 2026, is the project’s fifth full-length and its most volatile. Where Legacy (2023) moved with a certain controlled momentum, this record pushes outward, louder and less contained, the kind of melodic black metal that fills a festival field without losing the pressure of something recorded in a single room by a single person.
The album is built as a triptych. Three instrumental Prayer tracks, the first a confession of sin, the last a closing amen, divide the record into acts, and between them, every full song ends with a direct quotation from scripture. Deuteronomy, Matthew, Isaiah, Numbers, the Psalms. Noise lets the texts indict themselves, placing them at the end of songs that have already shown what those texts produce in human hands.
That structure is what separates Blessings and Curses from ordinary anti-religious metal. The album’s speaker is a believer. He pleads, confesses, calls out to a God who does not answer. “Show Mercy” opens with a pilgrim navigating moral darkness by starlight and scripture, and closes with the Deuteronomy passage that gives the album its title: Moses setting life and death, blessing and curse, before the people, demanding they choose. “The Forsaken” is Psalm 22 in full collapse, the voice crying into silence, a worm among men, unanswered from cradle to the grave. The hostility in the music is real and present, but it is the hostility of someone still inside the system, still using its language, still unable to leave.
“Kora” is where the mask slips. The track retells Numbers 16, the story of Korah, son of Izhar, who led a rebellion of 250 community leaders against Moses and was swallowed alive by the earth as punishment. Noise gives Korah’s argument its full hearing: Moses has not delivered the promised land, has led the people into the wilderness to die, has crowned himself prince over them. The ground simply opens, and two hundred and fifty men burn. And the song ends with three words: “God is good.” Delivered straight, in the rubble of a mass execution, it is the most damning line on the record.
“The Sacrifice” quotes Christ from Matthew 10, the passage where Jesus declares he came not to bring peace but a sword, to set son against father, daughter against mother, and demands that his followers love him above their own families or be deemed unworthy. Noise’s commentary is blunt: “extorted into gratitude.” The transaction of salvation, paradise bartered for a life of self-denial, rendered as coercion with a smile.
“The Indulgence” closes the argument. The medieval Catholic practice of selling indulgences, certificates of forgiveness purchased from the Church that Martin Luther’s 1517 theses attacked as corrupt beyond repair, becomes the album’s final image of institutional religion: guilt manufactured, then sold back to the guilty. “Mortality, a manmade sickness.”
What keeps Blessings and Curses from becoming a lecture is the chaos Noise lets into the music. This is a record built for open air and large crowds, the kind of melodic black metal where riffs and chants carry across a field. But the production stays close, the arrangements retain the friction of something made alone, and the combination produces a specific tension: the intimacy of private crisis playing out at stadium volume. The believer’s voice, amplified until it becomes a crowd, which is precisely how fanaticism works.
The project’s name is the exact phrase from Psalm 13:1 in the Latin Vulgate, where the fool declares in his heart that there is no God. Noise has spent eight years building a project around that denial, and with Blessings and Curses, he makes the strongest case yet: not by arguing against faith, but by letting faith speak for itself.
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