Origin: Cavaso del Tomba, Treviso, Italy 🇮🇹
Genre: Black Metal
Alas, as we revel within the frigid grip of winter’s final grasp, as the acrid smolder of ritual sacrifice clears and the salty stench of stagnant crimson fills our lungs, we await Thysia. They’re emerging from the void into this precursor to extinction we call now with ancient tomes – spells of lost times and catalytic incantations to bring forth the end of days – the destruction of humanity’s curse and all cosmic order. Black metal of cosmic proportions yet rooted in the nostalgia of those first pure days when newly discovered roads to war, death and Hell, but also wisdom and enlightenment were first traversed by the scene’s warriors of the dawn. On April 7, Thysia will unveil their debut album, “Islands In Cosmic Darkness” via Chaos Records.
Through a lethal balance of heavy Mayhem worship and some weighty Dissection-heralding anti-cosmic vibes, Thysia are making their presences felt. Not as some ouroboric entity, but as an insatiable cosmic serpent; ravenous and snaking its way throughout the European black metal underground. With “Islands In Cosmic Darkness”, Thysia are laying before us a dark, perpetual and labyrinthine compositional path fraught with gauntlet after perilous gauntlet – something similar to the Icelandic style – although somehow even more baleful to the senses. And as this cavernous recording evokes images of once-thriving galaxies now eternally dormant, you’ll hear the sound of “Scorched Bronze Earth” and “Nexus of Cataclysmic Forces”; dirges to edge all life and energy into one final climactic purge as the sound of brutal black metal echoes off into the nothing of what once was. Nothing but the void now slowly and affirmatively becoming the universe.
“Spiritual Desert” and the titular cut left now to soundtrack the remainder of what’s been a dismal voyage through some of BM’s coldest and blackest environments. Adversarial to all life, extinguishing of the spirit and utterly hopeless, “Islands In Cosmic Darkness” is something a little more than your typical Armageddon-worshiping black metal record. We’re talking interplanetary destruction leading to total universal desolation – an almost unfathomable concept realized through the reversal of imagination. Thysia take their understanding of what black metal should stand for and apply it on a massive scale, and the result is exactly what it should be; the end of everything…
There’s nothing too melodic and certainly nothing I would even call pleasant to the ear to be found here. This music feels as if it wasn’t designed to be enjoyed or taken in with any kind of appreciation for anything other than the comfort of knowing that the end is nigh, and that soon all will be reversed; ending this failed experiment called creation. So, I guess in some ways you can call “Islands” something that feels like the ultimate black metal experience. However, I’m of the mind that for Thysia, a few more years spent constellated and calling forth our universal apocalypse will undoubtedly make that could-be experience a vivid reality one day. More than a valiant effort and a definitive statement made as to who this band is. It’s rare for a project to find its identity so early on, and it’s looking like Thysia are dead-set on their course as revisionists of anti-cosmic black metal.
8/10
Experience “Psallo” from “Islands In Cosmic Darkness” right here as presented by Chaos Records:
~Jeger
