Artist: Azzagrat
Country: Finland
Label: Self-Released
Formats: Digital
Year: 2025
Again, completely out of the blue there’s another new Finnish Black Metal band. The duo behind Azzagrat for now remains anonymous, but felt confident enough to go straight for the full-length album, skipping all the mandatory demoing. And while that is not always the best of ideas, Azzagrat’s take on Raw Black Metal is well suited for this approach.
‘Kaikuja Kuilusta’ translates to something like ‘Echoes From The Abyss’ and turns out to be quite an appropriate title for its musical content. The album clocks in under the half hour mark, but proves to make the most out of its perfect playing time. Generally albums hardly need to be over thirty minutes and when they are built on rather one-dimensional fundamentals like ‘Kaikuja Kuilusta’ it is even more vital to keep things short and lethal.
As a whole, this debut album reminds me most on the early steps of a Dutch band called Haat, which in turn derived its raison d’être from the iconic Ildjarn. At its core, it is raw and unpolished, but with a remarkably interesting sense for song writing it takes me back to the days I ordered demo tapes from Haat and Ichneutic. Both of them lean heavily on the musical legacy of Ildjarn in which the guitars and drums are almost melted together in the harshness of the “production” and with the vocals most prominently on the fore.
The seemingly live recorded songs add to the overall imperfect and rather Punk or Garage Rock sort of approach in song structures and overall minimalism. A true sense of energetic purity and straightforwardness is what gives ‘Kaikuja Kuilusta’ its irresistible and vibrant character that will certainly appeal to fans of the aforementioned bands as well as Akitsa, Ødelegger, Bone Awl or the more recent Kūka’ilimoku, Vengeance Sorcery, Nihil Invocation or Chevallier Skrog.
