Band: Dreich
Album: Edicius (EP)
Genre: Depressive Suicidal Black Metal / Melodic Black Metal
From: Aberdeen, Scotland
Release date: 18th July 2025
Label: As Pestis Records
Introduction
Depressing, gloomy, and oppressively bleak. But enough about Aberdeen, let’s talk about Dreich, a new band in the Scottish black metal scene who just released their debut EP. I was lucky to see Dreich open Fires of Alba MMXXV very recently, where afterwards I got asked the hopeful question “I don’t suppose you do album reviews as well as gig reviews, do you?” as I got passed an early copy of their new CD. Well, yes, yes I do.
Edicius
Tracklist:
- Cold
- Sharing Death
- Aperta Voulnera
- Tower of Sorrow
- Propria Manu Mori
Five tracks of misery await you on this debut, four of them in their more melodic black metal style and one ambient piece serving as the outro to the EP. Distorted rhythms with a second guitar performing clean picking and tremolo riffs are the core audial landscape, accompanied by clear and loud growls high in the mix, reminding me of something akin to Ofnus – Time Held me Grey and Dying.
A couple of notable standouts for me on this album are Sharing Death and Tower of Sorrow. Sharing Death opens with a sorrowful guitar in the middle of a rainstorm, before an unrelenting scream kicks us off with a wretched downpour of cold and tormenting misery. Big fan of simple environmental storytelling through ambient sound effects in songs if they’re done well, as it can really help the ambience. A nice simple slow guitar solo as the chorus-driven clean picking in the background creating a sepulchral moment, before the return of blast beats and tremolo picking for some melodic black metal.
At just under 8 minutes long, Tower of Sorrow brings us their longest full song on the EP. It is also the most thematically misanthropic and woeful on Edicius. Opening with some militaristic snare rolls ahead of the slow gentle pace that takes you away, it ever so gradually builds up, bringing you up right to the edge and slowing back into its gentle pace again. But this song doesn’t leave you with blast beat blue balls, with the last 30 seconds being a barrage of pure black metal to finish the final song, leaving only the outro track to round it off.
Propria Manu Mori, and it’s a lengthy outro at that, clocking in at nearly ten and a half minutes. An experimental weave of instrumentation to the beat of a ticking clock. Reverberated vocals sample the suicide note of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) as read by Octavia Selena Alexandru. That particular section seemed evocative of similar Shining instances such as Låt Oss Ta Allt Från Varandra, Total Utfrysning, Längtar Bort Från Mitt Hjärta, or The Eerie Cold.
Conclusion
The full EP clocks in at 34 minutes, if you minus the ambient outro piece that’s just shy of 25 minutes of black metal, a good starting point for the band to find their feet and get their music out there as they begin to play more shows to some larger crowds. I would like to see some longer songs from them, to see how they can flex their songwriting muscles into a genre that often lets songs really breathe and extend their futile themes. Some piano or sombre synths wouldn’t go amiss if incorporated into their music, to build on the desolate atmosphere. Still, an absolutely solid debut from them, The release is full of crushing slow distorted riffs, is well mixed to the point of everything being clear but not overproduced, and has a good mix of pace maintaining a more melodic black metal style. Very keen on seeing what they have in store for us in the future.
BMZ Rating: 8 out of 10
Support Dreich here: https://dreichmusic.bandcamp.com/merch
Your thoughts on Dreich
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