Artist: Sonnenpfähler
Country: USA
Label: Annulet
Formats: Digital Demo
Year: 2026
On the very first day of this year Sonnenpfähler digitally released its debut demo through the Annulet label/circle of which this one-woman project is an active participant of. And, fairly, not just a participant, but a very active one as well. She’s also involved in Twilight Enchantment, Leliel, Juniper, Seren and Mystic Realm Plagued with Eternal Curses – the latter was already featured on these pages before. And like the majority of Ellie “Moth” Rose’s work, this project too can be filed under Raw Black Metal.
The thing of this self-titled debut demo that caught me is the great sound. It is a thoroughly rough affair with a few elements that’s borderline lo-fi, but to me it really feels like a great collision of early 00s Black Metal with the kind of Raw Black Metal that has been popularized in the past decade or so. This means that it has the same unpolished sound and the actual riffs that bands like Xasthur, Krohm and, to a slightly lesser extent, Leviathan brought us some twenty-five years ago. Yet, at the same time it has a clear contemporary bite to the roughness in which the music as a whole is poured. In addition, I particularly love the acoustic guitar parts. The melancholy captured in that raw strumming reminds of Death In June and certainly do add something to the overall atmosphere. The transitions are still a bit rough and perhaps the balance between the acoustics and the Black Metal parts, which I believe is Sonnenpfähler’s core activity, is a little off here and there. But it certainly shows that Moth knows what she’s doing. Even though she has yet to celebrate her 20th birthday, she seems to have gained the necessary experience quickly, or at least to be a fast learner. As the first demo for this project, ‘Sonnenpfähler’ is certainly a more than promising start.
