Our review of "Chapter I: This Endless Solitude", the debut album by HOLISSSTIK, is now live — and we gave it an 8.5/10.
The album arrives tomorrow, Friday, August 14, via Season of Mist. Behind it is Tor-Helge Skei, who started MANES in Trondheim in the early nineties and has spent the thirty years since undoing whatever that beginning implied. "Vilosophe" in 2003 was the turn, the record where MANES stopped being a black metal band and became something nobody has since managed to categorize. HOLISSSTIK casts wider than LETHE, HØSTSOL, MANII, SYNING or KKOAGULAA, and it is the first of three planned albums.
The promo sheet says "Dark Electronic", which, as we wrote, is the least useful thing anyone could tell you about it.
Seventeen contributors turn up across eight tracks — a setup that usually produces bloat. It doesn't here. Forty-six minutes, nothing over seven, and at no point does it feel like a compilation. Skei wrote, arranged, recorded and mixed everything himself, so his guests were colouring inside lines he had already drawn, some of them sketched a decade or more ago. Someone, as we put it in the review, was willing to cut.
Among the moments we singled out: "Projections", the shortest piece and the only one with no guitar at all, where Kristoffer Oustad's synth and Nik Košar's voice work unease out of cosmic ambient drift; "Would You Take This Heart", which opens with Martyna Halas singing in Polish — near enough to Ukrainian that our reviewer understood the line "My heart is no one's, whose heart is mine?" before registering that he was translating — and later hides Buddhist monks chanting in Pali inside the same five minutes fifty.
The high point is "Behind Me", the tensest and least constructed thing on the record, with Christophe Denhez pushing his voice to the edge of a shout over his own lyrics and an audible rhythm section in a room. The title track then closes with no drums whatsoever, lighter and warmer, bringing back the two voices the album opened with.
Knut V. Prytz — NECROPHAGIA's guitarist for eight years and now Skei's usual mastering choice — keeps it legible at volume, and Adrien Bousson's wilted-flowers cover tells you where this is heading before you've heard a note.
If "Chapter I" is the opening of a trilogy, Skei has set himself a hard standard to follow.