Out 7 April, 2026
Via Antiq
Words by: Courtney Stark
There’s something about one-man black metal projects — they exist in a space that feels both deliberate and inevitable. Born from misanthropy, disgust, or simply the desire for complete creative control, they occupy the more obscure fringes of an already extreme genre. And yet, those fringes are no longer so distant. Increasingly, these solitary works are finding their place among the wider congregation.
The black metal landscape is flooded with lone wolves. Veterans like Leviathan laid the groundwork, while more recent and prominent names such as Blackbraid, Hellripper, and Ruadh continue to carve their paths through it — each distinct, yet bound by that same thread of isolation.
It’s within this lineage that Tarask continues to unfold its narrative. What began with Pharus Morti was a descent into a decaying, almost sentient industrial city, steeped in Lovecraftian dread and quiet corruption that now pushes further inward and more insidious. With Sitra Ahra and now its successor, the focus shifts from the world around the protagonist to the collapse within — a movement away from observation and into absorption.
The new album follows that same figure, no longer merely a witness to decay, but something shaped by it — left alone to sift through what remains. In that isolation, the turn toward the occult feels less like choice and more like inevitability, a grasp for structure within internal ruin. Themes of consumerism, conformity, and spiritual erosion linger in the background, but here they feel secondary to the more personal descent. It’s a record that leans further into atmosphere and introspection, where black metal is not just a vehicle for aggression, but a medium for something quieter, heavier — and far more consuming.
With each track named simply Evocation (I through VI), the album takes on the form of a ritual in motion — a series of deliberate invocations, where each passage feels less like progression and more like a step deeper into something that cannot be undone.
In Evocation IV, the album takes on a more melancholic turn, drifting into dark, acoustic passages layered with quiet, almost will-o’-the-wisp female vocals that flicker at the edges. It’s a rare moment of fragility — brief, deceptive — before Evocation V pulls everything back under, plunging the listener once again into a deeper, more consuming darkness.
This is an album more concerned with a slow, deliberate unraveling — a descent that rejects resolution or clarity outright. Each evocation pulls deeper, stripping away anything unnecessary until only the core remains: isolation, introspection, and something far less tangible taking shape beneath it all. Tarask offers no answers here, no comfort — only a mirror held up to the void, and the quiet understanding that once you’ve stared long enough, there is no clean way back.
