ELFFOR, HYVER And ERROIAK Split The Bear Three Ways — 'Roi des Forêts - Basoen Jauna' Arrives November 11

Antiq will release "Roi des Forêts - Basoen Jauna" on November 11, a three-way split between ELFFOR, HYVER and ERROIAK built entirely around one animal: the bear, king of the forests in French and in Basque alike. Eight songs, three very different approaches to atmospheric black metal, and a shared conviction that the bear is the actual soul of the woods rather than a decoration in them.

ELFFOR opens it with the longest piece on the record by a distance — "Urkhal" runs twenty minutes. It follows the tracks of an immense white bear who takes a clan of wild men under his protection, and ends where legends usually end: years later, with the children of the tribe still claiming they can see the great bear's breath in the mountains. Eöl's project, from the Spanish side of the Basque Country, has moved between pure dungeon synth and outright black metal across its discography; this is firmly the second kind, epic in build and fierce in delivery.

HYVER takes the middle four songs and treats the theme like a research project. "Culte Ancestral" goes to the ancestral bear-cults. "Le Premier Dieu" follows that cult into the present through the most unlikely survival imaginable — the teddy bear in a child's bed. "Cannelle" is named for the bear shot by a hunter in the French Pyrenees in 2004, the last of the purebred native Pyrenean line, whose death forced a national argument about what France had let happen. "Le Trône des Bois" closes his section as a meditative dreamscape, a glimpse of the mythic clearing where the bears gather. HYVER is a French multi-instrumentalist working solo under his own project name since 2023, pushing keyboard melodies further forward than he does elsewhere.

ERROIAK — "crows" in Basque, and a musician from the French side of the same country — closes the record with dungeon-synth black metal built on nostalgic synth and piano lines, slow-paced by the standards of the genre and openly indebted to SUMMONING. "Basoen Jauna" is a description of the bear's power. "Harpeko Oihua" leaves his spirit behind in a cave. "Azken Ehiza" ends the album on a deliberate ambiguity: a hunter's tracks are followed, but it is never settled whether the hunter is a man walking towards his fate, or the Bear himself on the Last Hunt.

Antiq has been working this way since 2009 — lyrics, artwork, video and physical objects treated as one object rather than four — and keeps its production with small French creators wherever it can.

Two tracks are already out: ERROIAK's "Azken Ehiza" is streaming at Antiq's Bandcamp, and an excerpt of ELFFOR's "Urkhal" is below.

"Roi des Forêts - Basoen Jauna" track listing