EP REVIEW: Where Emptiness Is All – Hyl
Featuring members from both Italy and Poland, HYL may only have released a single EP, but the black metal trio have already begun to make significant waves. With those members’ CV’s including stellar underground acts such as DEATHWORKS BATUSHKA and BLACK ALTAR, this band boasts a wealth of musical talent within its ranks that makes their debut EP Where Emptiness Is All an incredibly effective record that shows plenty of promise, the first of what will hopefully be many excellent releases.
After the sombre and atmospheric Pvrification sets a foreboding and grandiose tone for what’s to come, Into The Unknown, the first full song on the record, proves to be an incredibly intense offering, with dense rhythms, energetic drumming and soaring, melodic leads that carve through the more impenetrable undercurrent of the music and provide some lighter moments. The gutturals, being extremely coarse and throaty, further add to the weighty, punishing qualities of this track, adding yet another ferocious element to the overall sound. The ethereal, hypnotic ambience that appears towards the end of this song helps to bolster the more dramatic side of the band’s sound, lending a sharper, more polished sound to what has been, for the most part, an immense and opaque slab of black metal.
These more cinematic components bleed seamlessly into the opening motif of the following track Endless Illusions, a song that plays up the powerful and bombastic style of the preceding offering with the resulting track feeling leaner and more brooding, with tighter guitar and drum performances and higher, snarling vocals adding to the acerbic effect. It’s another brilliant and lengthy piece of music that is impressive for different reasons to the last one, possessing a sharper and more expansive sound where what came before it felt muscular and aggressive.
While Where Emptiness Is All may only be a relatively short record, it manages to showcase a lot with the time that it has and cover a lot of ground musically. There’s a definite emphasis on atmosphere and ambience within this record’s core sound, with the contrasting density and harsher death metal of Into The Unknown and the expansive, tight black metal of Endless Illusions each feeling distinct from the other. Whether HYL opt to take the darker blackened death metal route or atmospheric black metal approach in the future remains to be seen, but they are onto a winning formula regardless of which side of their sound they lean into. Where Emptiness Is All provides some incredibly solid foundations on which to build some impressive music, and hopefully their next record will explore what features here in more depth and on a larger scale.
Rating: 8/10
Where Emptiness Is All is out now via Odium Records.
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