Japanese avant-garde metal veterans SIGH have announced their next album, "Goh-ka," bringing together an unusual cast of guest musicians from across the extreme metal world for a record mainman Mirai Kawashima calls one of the band's most personal to date.
The album's core lineup features Kawashima alongside Dr Mikannibal and guitarist Nozomu Wakai, joined on this outing by bassist Frédéric Leclercq, known for his work in KREATOR and DRAGONFORCE, and drummer Mike Heller, who has played with RAVEN and FEAR FACTORY. The album's most eye-catching cameo comes on the track "Unputenpu," which features a guest guitar solo from OPETH's Mikael Åkerfeldt.
"Goh-ka" spans eleven tracks and roughly 57 minutes, and was mixed and mastered by Lasse Lammert at LSD Studios in Germany after being recorded across multiple studios. Kawashima described the record as "as equally personal an album as 'Shiki,' both musically and lyrically" — a reference to SIGH's acclaimed 2015 album, long considered one of the band's creative high points.
Thematically, "Goh-ka" draws on Buddhist concepts of impermanence and death, with artwork inspired by "kuso-zu," a series of paintings depicting the nine stages of human decomposition traditionally used in Buddhist meditation practice. The tracklist includes a multi-part "Kuso-shi" suite alongside songs such as "Jigoku-Zoshi."
Formed in Tokyo in 1989, SIGH have spent more than three decades restlessly reinventing extreme metal, folding in elements of jazz, classical music, prog and traditional Japanese instrumentation across albums like "Hail Horror Hail," "Imaginary Sonicscape" and "Shiki." The band's willingness to pull in collaborators from far outside black or death metal circles — as seen here with Leclercq and Åkerfeldt — has become one of its defining traits.
With Kawashima framing "Goh-ka" as a spiritual sibling to "Shiki," expectations are high that the album will rank among SIGH's most significant late-career statements. No release date or label has been announced yet, but the guest list alone — spanning Germany, Sweden and the band's own genre-hopping history — signals another ambitious chapter for one of extreme metal's most unpredictable acts.