Uusi teknokratia

To call this black metal is true in only the most partial sense — the Finnish band operates in a space where the genre's tremolo-picked density and shrieked vocals become raw materials fed into something far more alien. The rhythm section here is krautrock-influenced, locked into hypnotic repetition that could go on for ten or twenty minutes without losing its hold, and over this mechanical groove the guitars and synthesizers build layer upon layer of psychedelic interference until the song feels less like a piece of music than like a transmission from a frequency your equipment was never meant to receive. There is a cosmological ambition to the sound: the title translates to something like "new technocracy," and the music enacts that phrase — cold, systematic, vast, indifferent to human comfort. The vocal performance sits inside the mix rather than above it, another textural element in a composition that treats the human voice as instrument rather than focal point. This is Finnish experimental metal at its most serious and strange, part of a wave of artists who took the corpse paint and darkness of black metal and asked what would happen if you replaced the Romantic medievalism with genuine philosophical menace. You would listen to this alone, at volume, in the dark, when you want your sense of scale dismantled.