DRUDKH released their eighth album, "Handful of Stars" — in Ukrainian, "Пригорща зірок" — on September 20th, 2010, through Season of Mist's Underground Activists imprint. The guitar sound is significantly cleaner than on anything the Ukrainian band had recorded before, and critics immediately heard post-rock in it, with comparisons to ALCEST arriving within days. Reviews split accordingly: listeners who had come for the cold, distant atmospherics of "Autumn Aurora" and "Blood in Our Wells" felt the warmth as a betrayal, while others counted it among the year's finest records, and Haunting the Chapel placed it eighth on its 2010 list. As always, the lyrics draw on Ukrainian poetry, here Oleksa Stefanovych and Svyatoslav Hordynskyi. The limited box set included the "Slavonic Chronicles" EP, with covers of MASTER'S HAMMER and SACRILEGIUM.
