RADBRAKER – When The Mist Falls

Gauzy crescendoes unearth a sense of wary unease in the opening bars of Kadaverdauw, vocals deep and layered through the middle like sediment. Radbraker quickly establish their structural tact of moving from one place to another without clear delineation and they do so in this first instance by building intensity one rugged brick at a time, mixing guitars in the foreground and situating vocals floating in the midground, humanistic and yearning through the mist. The first track alone showcases a mastery of a full repertoire of well-supported, almost effortless screams which take on a darker, more guttural edge in the closing verses. You have moved from the anticipation of something hidden in the shadows, to facing the shadows by marching toward whatever they contain.

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The transition into Edele Gramshcap is beautiful, a sustained pitch morphing into soft acoustic guitars. It feels like the progression point in a video game after an open-world journey, where the adversary emerges from the trees, and begins to take on an almost doom metal edge in the way Radbraker are completely unafraid to wield extended instrumental passages with spaced out anchor points, sludgy and dirge-y and painstakingly laid out, before hinting at picking up the pace in sporadic phrases ahead of full-bodied commitment. Female clean vocals in the last third of the track swirl in amongst articulated guitar melody; grounded with intermittent growls, they are ascendent, otherworldly, a light in a greyed out landscape. Atmospherically, it’s all-encompassing. By the end of the second track, the world is built, cohesive, and is so deeply sunken that there’s no exit point for the listener to come up for air.

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Without breaking the trance, lower synth tones morph like air into dew that fuzzes out to a grittier, edgier refrain. Katharsis is, tonally, exactly what the name suggests; raw, vulnerable, visceral, exposed. Each note is given exactly the amount of space it needs, like individual droplets allowed to splatter in shimmering synchronicity, a masterclass in texture, which drop out in the end to leave man exposed.

Danst, Bok Dans is rebuilt brick by rugged brick from the soil up. There’s a ruggedness and momentum stark to the raw grace of the preceding track. It seems separate, until the desperation of the vocals returns, albeit with a more driving sense of momentum, and the physicality that runs a through line throughout When The Mist Falls… is more evident than ever. Just as you settle into a passage of repetition, a floor is tugged out from underneath. The effect is such that you are allowed to sink into the haze, but never long enough to breach complacency. It’s calculated.

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Duizen Haerden, translated from Dutch to mean ‘a thousand hearths’, is a culmination of all the breathtaking elements Radbraker have wielded with greater degrees of separation in preceding

tracks. Delicately picked out acoustic guitar over ominously building cello that drops out into a discordant wall of distorted guitar, and there’s a moment of muted, spoken vocals that give way to a rousing shriek to “arise!”

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Swaying, translucent, and almost dance-like, Radbraker are unafraid of space and time. The result is a record that sucks you in, pulls you under and sits you in simultaneous discomfort and awe; one of the core paradoxes black metal exists to make you feel. When The Mist Falls… straddles black metal sounds with doom metal space; each idea is given time and the breathing room to settle under the dust with no rush to move onwards. In discomfort or eerie meditation, every section is afforded the same treatment, aligned with the doom metal philosophy of sitting in the full spectrum of human emotions as they come. When The Mist Falls… is a full realised enmeshing of the physical and the natural, a homecoming invitation to sit within your own humanity. 

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SCORE 9/10

Reviewed by Charlie Fern