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, Lithuania. 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.
Albert Camus published Le Mythe de Sisyphe (“The Myth of Sisyphus”) in 1942, proposing that the only serious philosophical question is whether life is worth living. His answer lay in the act of pushing the boulder: meaning through repetition, defiance through the refusal to stop. Sisyphean, a five-piece from Vilnius, Lithuania, took their name from that essay when they renamed themselves from Division in 2014. Guitarist Kamil U. is the sole remaining member from the original lineup. Vocalists, bassists, drummers have come and gone, yet Kamil kept pushing.
Divergence arrives four years after Colours of Faith (2022), the record that earned Sisyphean a 17-date European tour alongside MGŁA and Ulcerate and drew comparisons to the Icelandic dissonant school and to Deathspell Omega’s architectural chaos. The new album was tracked at Hertz Studio in Białystok, Poland, and produced by Wojtek Wiesławski, the engineer behind Behemoth’s and Decapitated’s most brutal recordings. The cover artwork, by Nuremberg-based illustrator Chris Kiesling (Misanthropic-Art), depicts a blindfolded figure in dark robes standing alone on a rocky shore, hair torn by wind, clutching two forked rods. The sea stretches behind, jagged rocks breaking through the surf. The palette is monochrome, rendered in stippled ink, all brown and grey. A figure searching for something it cannot see, on ground that offers no comfort. It suits the record’s preoccupation with psychological manipulation and the damage inflicted by personalities that operate blind to their own toxicity. Kiesling’s image mirrors the album’s trajectory: the barren coastline in the foreground, the deeper, wilder sea behind it.
The current lineup seats Dainius P. on vocals, Kamil U. and Saulius B. on guitars, Augustinas B. on bass, and Mantas D. on drums. Eight tracks. Forty-two minutes and twenty-nine seconds. The songs are compact by the standards of modern black metal, most running between five and seven minutes, and that brevity is a statement in itself. Divergence is approachable. The aggression has momentum, and the compact runtimes keep it moving. The production by Wiesławski is modern and sleek, everything hitting with clarity, and nothing buried under murk for the sake of atmosphere.
The album opens with “The Tower,” a corridor of 1:42 that deposits the listener into “A Point in the Abyss.” The first half of the record establishes the language: dissonant guitar interplay, death metal density, and Dainius’s corrosive vocal attack. “In Divergence,” the title track, hits hard and moves fast, black/death metal stripped to its essentials, five minutes with no wasted space.
The second half is where Divergence opens up and reveals its ambitions. “Stupor Mundi” borrows the Latin epithet given to Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250), the ruler of the Kingdom of Sicily and the Holy Roman Empire whose intellectual brilliance and political ruthlessness made him both celebrated and reviled across medieval Europe. The phrase translates to “the wonder of the world” or “the astonishment of the world.” The title feels earned here: the album’s scope expands in its latter stretch, the structures grow more complex, the mood more daring.
“Black Bird That Brings No Joy” is the record’s revelation. Beautiful and melodic in a way the earlier tracks only hint at, the song unfolds with a structural clarity that lodges in the memory and stays there. The guitar solo is impressive. The vocal performance shifts register, the tempos breathe and contract. It is the most adventurous piece on the album, and it raises a question the rest of the record invites but cannot answer alone: is this an experiment, or a preview of what comes next? The song leaves a hunger for more. If Sisyphean chose to follow the thread that “Black Bird” opens, the fourth album could be a different animal entirely.
“Sangfroid,” the closer, translates from the French sang-froid (“cold blood”), the capacity for composure under pressure. At 7:20, it is the album’s longest track, and it ends with a sweep that makes a case for the live stage. This will be a crowd song. The album, having built its density through the second half, ends in that daring register, leaving the listener inside the more complex, more confident version of Sisyphean rather than retreating to safe ground.
Sisyphean have been building toward this for over a decade. Illusions of Eternity (2017, Drakkar Productions) was a raw first statement. Colours of Faith refined the dissonance and found a wider audience. Divergence, now on Norway’s Edged Circle Productions, is the leanest and most focused record of the three. And in “Black Bird That Brings No Joy,” it contains something rarer: the sound of a band discovering a door they may have only just opened.
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