Some 30 years later, the ugly spirit unleashed by a dozen or so Norwegian teenagers has proven to be surprisingly adaptable and, strangest of all, marketable: As musicians have found ways to diversify the sound of black metal via shoegaze, folk music, drone, and bluegrass, corporations like e.l.f. cosmetics and KFC have used corpse paint and blastbeats to move products. Black metal itself has evolved to become more adventurous, curious, and—above all—comfortable with how queer the whole putting-on-costumes-and-makeup-to-sing-about-your-fantasies thing is. In response, traditionalists have gnashed their teeth and complained that the dark essence of the music has been lost. So you might be able to understand why, when the Ukrainian artist Këkht Aräkh, whose corpse paint and wrist spikes make him virtually indistinguishable from black metal’s progenitors, got off a few poses in his “Wänderer” video that made him look like Lil Peep cosplaying as Per “Dead” Ohlin, he became the most polarizing figure in the genre since the dude who wore sunglasses on an album cover.
Dmitry Marchenko’s first two albums as Këkht Aräkh—2019’s Night & Love and 2021’s Pale Swordsman, both reissued in 2022 by Sacred Bones—were relatively straightforward collections of frosty Depressive Suicidal Black Metal (DSBM) offset with neoclassical acoustic guitar interludes and ambient whooshing. What both records suggested, and what Morning Star makes clear, is Marchenko’s understanding of the campiness inherent in black metal. Crucially—or most perniciously, depending on your perspective—Marchenko barely departs from black metal orthodoxy. While Deafheaven used the music’s prettiness to power their pink-and-blackgaze, making it as accessible to fans of My Bloody Valentine as Xasthur, Marchenko embeds his digressions more deeply in the music; not even the plaintive singing of Swedish emo-rapper Bladee on single “Eternal Martyr” pulls us out of the familiar.
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Marchenko’s primary aim has always been to develop a warmer, more tender version of DSBM. That’s apparent not only in the sweetness of his lyrics but also in the way he delivers them. Rather than a crackling shriek, he tends to croak his vocals, landing somewhere between Death’s Chuck Schuldiner and an anthropomorphic bullfrog. That means when he sings a line like “No stars in the sky/Night is so black” in “Lament,” you can actually hear and understand what he’s saying. Morning Star was recorded straight to tape on a Portastudio in Stockholm and Marchenko’s current home of Berlin, cloaking everything in a thin mist of hiss. That in turn creates an illusion of heaviness that Marchenko exploits—because a song like “Castle” feels heavy, it doesn’t have to be as heavy, which frees up space in the music; it’s what allows the clean guitar in “Wänderer” to become the focus, drifting as it does like moss in the song’s skeletal branches.
Play Morning Star through your Macbook speakers and it might sound like relatively standard lo-fi black metal. Play it in decent headphones and the hail of tremolo-picked guitars recedes a bit, allowing the elegance of the chord progressions to come through. You’ll also discover that Morning Star is the rare black metal album in which you don’t have to hunt through a thicket of noise to find the bass. The low end fills out a song like “Three Winters Away,” its syncopation providing an emotional counter to the speedy blur of the guitars. A clean picking pattern emerges, like a cautious fox in a clearing, then just as suddenly turns tail. While Marchenko produced the album himself, Swedish electronic musician Varg2™ assisted with the sound design; the latter’s feel for flossy ambience is most obvious in the album’s “Outro,” but you can hear his influence in the dusty air that spaces out the vocals in “Angest” and the drifting among the ruins of “Castle.” Bladee blows gentle whispers down the sides of “Eternal Martyr,” and his feathery singing on the second verse seems to prompt Marchenko to get more guttural in response.
