UNVERKALT are drawn to the edge. Since emerging from the underground, the Germany by way of Greece post-metal band have balanced boundless atmosphere with suffocating heaviness. Their third album and first since signing with Season of Mist doesn’t continue in that direction so much as it plunges into the darkness that’s always been waiting below.
Héréditaire lifts the veil from our cursed existence. What emerges is Unverkalt’s heaviest and most heartfelt offering.
“Our aim has always been to blend softer, more romantic elements with extreme chaos. With Héréditaire that time has now come”, says the band’s guitarist and chief composer Themis Ioannou. “This album is a lament for what is far older than our very existence. It speaks of what seeps through generations, searching for an answer to one pervasive question: What do we carry that was never ours?”
From the beginning, Unverkalt was born from an urge to give life to grief. In 2017, Ioannou started the band with vocalist Dimitra Kalavrezou in hopes of creating something that was slow-burning and visceral, crushing yet delicate. Their debut made good on that promise: “…so rivetingly beautiful that you will have to deepen to digest it”, Metal Hammer Greece wrote in awe of L’Origine du Monde. “Easily on the top-10 of 2020”.
The band’s second album followed three years later to further acclaim. While swooning between obsession and annihilation, A Lump of Death: A Chaos of Dead Lovers sharpened Unverkalt’s vision by pushing their avant-garde streak with more force. “Beyond being able to point roughly towards a couple of different genres, it is utterly impossible to compare them to any other artist out there making music in the same vein”, The Sleeping Shaman admired. Echoes and Dust agreed: “It stands in its own right as a beautiful slice of filmic post-rock, a soundtrack without a movie beyond the one playing in your head”.
Héréditaire is still possessed by cinematic visions. Like a camera coming into focus, lead single “Die Auslöschung” appears through a thickening haze before it’s snapped out of a trance by drummer Christian Eggers’ fiery blast beats. The album shifts between colors, textures, even languages. Stirred by a mournful saw of strings, “Ænae Lithi” raises memories of the Great Fire of Smyrna that were handed down by Themis’ grandmother. But where previous albums took cues from French painting and European film noir, this one throws back the velvet curtain in favor a veil. “Oath Ov Prometheus” dismantles the myth of man as god’s perfect creation with Kalavrezou’s freshly blackened vocals.
“We love to experiment with every album”, Ioannou says. “With Héréditaire, we wanted to introduce extreme vocals because they bring out all these heavy feelings. It’s like they’re shaking you awake”.
While Héréditaire is a pulse-pounding new direction for Unverkalt, the album’s arc traces back to our deepest and darkest origins. Amidst the tremolo-picked wreckage of “Penumbrian Lament”, long-held beliefs are swallowed into the void of guitarist Eli Mavrychev’s death growls. “It’s all sorts of dead ideas / They cling to us all the same”, Kalavrezou whispers, only to break into screams on “Introjects” beneath Joscha Hoyer’s throbbing bass line. “The concept behind the record is tied in with the album’s overall heaviness”, she says. “Each song peels back another blackened layer of memory, trauma and suffering, which linger over us like ghosts: invisible, yet endlessly present”.
Kalavrezou’s mystifying cleans remain one of Unverkalt’s defining traits. Even when trembling beneath the monolithic riff of “I, The Deceit”, her contempt for those who stand by as the world burns is heated when forged alongside her Athenian brother-in-arms Sakis Tolis from Rotting Christ. But as the album draws to a close, Héréditaire ends shadowed in doubt for the future. “Bathed in lies / Can we make it better” she wonders before disappearing into the shivering wake left by “Maladie de ‘Esprit”.
“This album is not meant to resolve”, the band says, “but to dissolve patterns from those who came before, faceless yet familiar. The colors have drained. What remains is veiled in black, not as a symbol, but as a truth that covers everything”.
On Héréditaire, Unverkalt lift the veil on our cursed existence with their heaviest and most heartfelt offering.
While they’ve always pushed the intricate balance that defines post-metal, Unverkalt are now plummeting over the edge into the black below. Their upcoming third album and first since signing with Season of Mist descends into humanity’s deepest and darkest origins. Héréditaire lifts the veil from our cursed existence. What emerges is the band’s heaviest and most heartfelt offering.
Season of Mist is pleased to welcome Unverkalt to its roster. Originally founded in Athens and now based in Berlin, the avant-garde post-metal band has forged a name for themselves through emotionally immersive compositions, cinematic textures, and a fearless commitment to sonic experimentation.
