IMHA TARIKAT
Hearts Unchained – At War With A Passionless World LUPUS LOUNGE
Imperious darkness from Germany’s lauded black metal firebrands
THE GERMAN BLACK metal scene is in perennial rude health and produces large quantities of great music every year. Thus far, however, it has yet to produce a band to truly transcend the underground and strike through to a broader metal consciousness. Purveyors of a pitch-black and barbarous strain of extremity, Imha Tarikat have steadily evolved into Germany’s most likely. The band’s first two albums – 2019’s Kara Ihlas and the following year’s Sternenberster – detonated with irrefutable impact. Sonically superior and even more explosive than its predecessors, Hearts Unchained – At War With A Passionless World may prove to be too dark, too intense, for mainstream consumption, but Satan will surely find a way. Band mastermind Ruhsuz Cellât’s formidably individual approach and razor-sharp songwriting demand it.
Superficially, Imha Tarikat adhere loosely to the brutal and austere German black metal template, but there is momentum and mystique driving the likes of Radical Righteousness and Brute Majesty. Coupled with Ruhsuz’s incensed fairground barker vocals, that air of malevolent mystery lifts everything here to a higher plane of terror. At its best, Hearts Unchained… is almost overwhelming. Touch Of Mercy is a slow-burning assault on the senses that wields huge emotional clout. Flood Of Love (The Beast Trigger) is an epic maze of strange melody and furious melancholy. Most startling of all, Streams Of Power – Canavar is a sublime, four-to-thefloor post-punk anthem that makes perfect sense as a precursor to the wild and wicked miasma of Stardust Wisdom (Manifest Of The Deity To The Unkeen): a solid contender for black metal song of the year. Even the horror flick organ drones of interlude Birth Of Grandeur
feel strangely momentous and bereft of cliché.
Whatever curious source of infernal power Imha Tarikat are tapping into here, the end result is undeniable. This is black metal art of the highest quality. ■■■■■■■■■■
FOR FANS OF: Spectral Wound, Bölzer, Gaerea
DOM LAWSON