Music is an intensely personal thing. Whilst the corporate world has tried to package it up into a shiny box to sell to the lowest bidder for decades, there is music being released every day that precious few will get to hear.
I’d like to briefly talk about the bands creating wonderful music that I feel are criminally under-appreciated. In no particular order, mind you…
I’m sure I’ve talked about these guys before. I know I’ve mentioned Counting Hours at some stage. Anyway, Ilpo Paasela, the vocalist for Counting Hours has another band called The Chant.
Where Counting Hours is largely a death-doom affair, expertly mixing growls with cleans, The Chant is all cleans and arguably closer to the likes of Sisters of Mercy, or more recently HOST.
Their most recent single, Peace Underwater arrived during the pandemic and I was hopeful that more would follow, but things have gone a bit quiet since.
The best place to find them is on Bandcamp.
These are two project by Heike Langhans and Mike Lamb, which I like to call the Heikeverse. Both projects scratch a similar itch, but where REMINA is cosmic doom (doom with a hint of space travel), Light Field Reverie is more introspective and down to Earth.
Heike’s ethereal vocals coupled with a rich but occasionally oppressive soundscape makes for an absorbing ride. REMINA has two albums out now, Strata and The Silver Sea.
So far there is only one Light Field Reverie album out at the time of writing, called Another World, but there’s another one arriving in 2026. The first single, Ender, was released a few weeks ago.
This was a complete surprise when their new album, Cathexis arrived earlier in the year. Phendrana is a one-man-band project from Mexico-based Anuar Salum, in a similar vein to Saor and Sgàile.
It is atmospheric black metal, but with the confidence to put together an 18-minute masterpiece at the end of its four-track album.
I would kindly ask that you humour me this one time and have a listen to The Effigy & The Titan.
A single track with a number of different movements, rounding off a splendid album. Cathexis is a beautiful, confident and patient piece of work that you might expect from one of the prog titans, not a relatively unknown solo project. It’s an album of the year contender, no doubt.
