Manifesto Sentence: A restrained sob that turns melancholy into resonance.
Context Note:
With Le sanglot, IMPURE WILHELMINA steps into a new phase. Writing entirely in French gives the album a different accent and melodic contour; it genuinely opens a new side of the band. There are moments of chaotic undercurrents, yet the overall movement feels smooth and deliberate. The darkness does not erupt; it flows.
Michael Schindl’s voice is unquestionably the emotional core. It carries a deep, inward suffering that never turns theatrical. At times, it reminded me of the Swedish band Kent, that same restrained intensity, that same quiet ache beneath clarity.
Midway through the record, “Train mort” emerges like something leaking through a dark crack. Its post-black edge casts a shadow over the album, almost like a black glance interrupting the flow. The echoing transitions and trembling vocal tension are striking, unsettling, but powerful.
Artwork & Conceptual Frame: Le sanglot does not dramatize pain; it contains it. The title itself suggests not a scream, but a held sob. The aesthetic direction reflects this inner compression, which is controlled, melancholic, and lucid.
Country: Lithuania
Genre: Experimental Sludge Metal / Metalcore
Album Title: Epigrama
Release Date: May 29, 2026
Label: Season of Mist
Manifesto Sentence:
A suffocating meditation on modern decay where sludge density meets existential fracture.
Context Note:
With Epigrama, ERDVE move beyond the abrasive volatility of Savigaila into a more deliberate and structurally unified territory. Self-produced and entirely shaped by core members Vaidotas Darulis and Adomas Varnelis, the album emphasizes cohesion between composition, lyrical content and sonic architecture. Rather than amplifying chaos, the band refines it — channeling their experimental sludge foundations into a darker, more introspective and disciplined framework.
Epigrama carries the melancholy of the contemporary condition. The vocal delivery — emotionally strained and reminiscent of post-black metal’s expressive intensity — creates a painful yet deliberate bridge between lyric and sound. On “Skepsis,” especially, the sharp structural transitions showcase ERDVE’s originality: tension fractures and reforms without resolution.
This is sludge in its most experimental and abyssal form — dense, suffocating, and intellectually aware. The darkness here is not theatrical. It is internal. ERDVE do not explode outward; they implode inward, crafting a controlled descent into modern disquiet.
Artwork & Conceptual Frame:
The visual presentation mirrors the album’s internal collapse — minimal yet unsettling. The photography and design choices reinforce a sense of psychological erosion rather than external aggression. Conceptually, Epigrama functions as a reflective rupture: a confrontation with personal guilt, fragmentation and modern disintegration. The Lithuanian lyrics deepen this introspection, preserving cultural identity while amplifying universality.
Thematic Axis:
Existential self-disintegration, guilt-consciousness, modern alienation, entropic decay, and psychological implosion. Bandcamp
From Shadow to Thaw – Music, Philosophy, and a Glass Raised to the Night
I want to begin this piece like a letter of confession. This is the quiet confession of having never written, perhaps even never quite managed to write, about this music until now, even though for a long time I have been stepping blindly into every song they compose and, each time, setting off on my own psychedelic journey.
The 2025 album Shadow Play, the April 2026 EP Thaw, and my visit to Çal at the end of March finally brought this article into being, one centered on Drudkh’s music, lyrics, and a particular wine that accompanies them.
This article is about Drudkh, the Ukrainian atmospheric black metal band. Drudkh is a dark musical mirror of suffering, pain, and social decay. There are no live performances and no masks in this universe; what you encounter instead is a series of albums in which the notes cry out and the music is transferred from one body to another. Entering the realm of Drudkh is like holding a one-way ticket; after that, you begin to desire getting lost yourself. Especially if you are among those atmospheric black metal listeners whose veins have long been claimed by melancholy.
In DRUDKH’s music, melody flows without ever hurrying, while repetition becomes more than repetition, creating a hypnotic state that pulls the listener inward. The transitions do not arrive through harsh ruptures, but by slowly dissolving into one another; the music does not erupt, it expands inward. The mid-tempo passages, at times leaning toward doom, deepen this darkness even further. The long, echoing, and controlled screams never turn into spectacle; it is as though a narrator speaks from afar, telling his story without shouting, yet without surrendering. The sense of nature does not emerge through flutes or folk instruments either, but from the very texture of the melody itself, as if mist were rising on its own from between the notes.
The album I still place in a category of its own within their discography is Blood in Our Wells (2005). I can say that the epic intensity of this record reveals the spirit of the band in its most unguarded form. However, Furrows of Gods (Blood in Our Wells), Glare of Autumn (Autumn Aurora), Only the Wild Remembers My Name (Estrangement), and The Nocturnal One (All Belong to the Night) are essential milestones for tracing Drudkh’s footsteps.
The inclusion of texts by Ukrainian poets in their lyrics is one of the cornerstones of DRUDKH’s aesthetic line. The melodies of Drudkh carry the poetry of major figures of 1920s and 1930s Ukrainian modernism, such as Volodymyr Svidzinsky, Bohdan Ihor Antonych, Maik (Mykhailo) Yohansen, and Yevhen Pluzhnyk. The album A Few Lines in Archaic Ukrainian (2019), in particular, places these poets’ archaic Ukrainian verse at the center of its musical vision, forging a powerful connection between language, history, and cultural memory. Shadow Play (2025), meanwhile, moves this line onto a more inward and meditative plane.
2025 – Shadow Play
Released under Underground Activists, the underground-focused sub-imprint of Season of Mist, Shadow Play carries DRUDKH’s timeless aesthetic into a more refined darkness. The album creates a field of tension between the oppositions of existence: light and shadow, silence and storm, memory and oblivion.
While the band’s characteristic atmospheric and pagan black metal language remains intact, themes of exile, roots, and the cycle of life and death are strongly felt in the album’s narrative backbone. Tremolo-laden melodies, hypnotic repetitions, and a melancholic ambience place the listener in a world suspended between past and present.
DRUDKH embraces anonymity not as an aesthetic gesture, but as an ontological position. It refuses to surrender to the culture of visibility. Only the music speaks. Historical memory is felt not only on the lyrical level, but within the structure of the composition itself. In the lyrics, the legacy of poets such as Yakiv Savchenko resonates through this music. DRUDKH, in fact, produces timelessness. It speaks not through trends, but through historical consciousness.
Drudkh - "The Eve"
The sorrowful grandeur of The Eve, the defiant grief of The Exile, and the destructive beauty of The Thirst shape the album’s inner tension. This is not merely an act of listening, but an experience of turning inward.”
2026 – Thaw EP
Set for release in 24th April 2026, the Thaw EP was recorded during the same creative period as Shadow Play and stands as a direct extension of that album. It is not an independent change of direction, but a concentrated continuation.
The opening track, Memory, points not so much to nostalgia as to permanence. With a structure that stretches beyond seven minutes, it moves forward slowly, expanding its layers and carrying those familiar, epic Drudkh tones I find impossible to give up. It reflects the fragile dissolution of a frozen state of mind.
This three-track EP explores a state of lingering on the threshold, inner exile, and the quiet instability of change. Thaw is, in essence, a transitional work. Neither entirely new nor entirely old. A dissolution, but a controlled one.
Drudkh - Memory
As one falls asleep, as one emerges from sleep, the screams gradually spread and lengthen. Its atmospheric black metal structure leans toward doom. A dark spirit that seeps into us. This is precisely where DRUDKH’s black pearls are hidden.
Wine Pairing – Çal Karası (Lermonos)
While listening to the 2025 album Shadow Play, with its strong sense of local emphasis, I chose a local character from these lands: Çal Karası. The pride of the Çal region of Denizli.
Çal Karası is mostly used in the production of rosé. Yet the Denizli-based producer Lermonos has let the blood of this distinctive grape run, transforming it into a true red. Its pale red, brilliant color appears elegant, yet its structure is deeper than one might expect.
This is a grape that speaks in many tongues. It opens with red fruits: sour cherry, pomegranate, red plum. Then it brushes against fine spices, touches of clove. With a sudden turn, it leaves greenish reflections at certain angles. On the palate, it moves from reds that steadily intensify toward faint green tones, and with a bitter finish, it throws the truth in your face.
Its acidity is pronounced, sharp, and vivid. Being a child of a continental climate, it knows hardship well. The temperature difference within the day reveals itself in that piercing acidity. With its slender body, it carries shrill screams, yet it also possesses aromas deep and lingering enough to carry the melodies alongside them.
This is the wine of the night. Red enough for the full moon to want to fill its goblet with it. It is built to be drunk in the silence of the night, accompanied by heavy melodies. With the purple flowers it keeps trapped inside, it makes one final gesture and, as the night goes on, draws melancholy over itself. Like DRUDKH’s music, Çal Karası first leaves behind an intense shadow; it hardens with its pointed tongue, then curls inward with an unexpected elegance. Like silenced Renaissance poets, it bears pain in an aesthetic form. It is a refined yet sharp reply from Anatolia to the memory of Ukraine.
I raise my glass to a night paced out on the ground by His Twenty-Fourth Spring, and to Drudkh’s musical epic tale.
Lermonos Carovino Çal Karası 2024
DRUDKH listens not only to the poetry of the past, but to the tremor of a land still shaking beneath the present. The connection it draws between historical memory and present-day fragility makes their music not only timeless, but painfully relevant and unmistakably black metal.
"The equinox is behind us.
A cold spring night. In every sound, In every breath, In every gust of wind, April."
