Black Metal Chronicles: DRUDKH: A Music That Belongs to the Night

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."

Квітень (April)

Гра тіней (Shadow Play)