Bandcamp Aeturna formed in Tilburg in 2023 to make old school death doom, the kind the early nineties did, and they got as far as writing their first songs before their singer William died in 2024. They already had a show booked. Matt Small of the Welsh band The Drowning stepped in so the show could happen as a tribute, and then stayed.
This album is those first five songs. Every one of them has William’s hand in it. The photograph of him in the booklet is taken from his funeral card. None of that is on the sleeve or in the song titles, and the band have not built a concept around it, which is the right decision and also the reason the record is harder to write about than it looks.
What is actually on the tape
Thirty four minutes, five tracks, nothing under five and a half minutes. The sleeve is a photograph of a moon behind cloud, seen through branches, almost monochrome. Classic, unembarrassed, and about as far from a statement as you can get.
The sound is wide rather than dark. For a genre that usually buries itself, Aeturna keep roughly a fifth of their energy up above five kilohertz on every track, which puts the cymbals and the reverb tails well forward and gives the record its cavernous quality rather than a murky one. Thijs Mulders and Gerben van der Aa play guitars, Robbie Rijpert bass, Sarban Grimminck drums, and van der Aa mixed it with Mulders and mastered it himself.
The thing the numbers show
These five songs measure almost identically. Their tonal centres sit within 235 hertz of each other across the whole album, their treble share varies by barely a percentage point, and four of the five hold between five and nine decibels between their quietest and loudest passages. Only “A Mirror Darkly”, the opener, moves properly, opening fourteen and a half.
On most records that would be my main complaint and it is still a reservation here. But it is worth saying what it probably is. These are not five songs assembled from different phases of a band. They are the first five things a band wrote, in one stretch, before anything happened to them. Records made that way sound like this: one idea, worked through five times, with no outside sessions and no second thoughts yet.
Where it works
“The Last Funeral” is the longest and the best, eight and a half minutes that use the room properly rather than just filling it, and the only track where the slow tempo feels chosen rather than inherited. “Wreathed in Tears” has the clearest arrangement, and Small’s delivery across the record is restrained in a way that serves the material: he is singing somebody else’s songs and he does not try to own them.
Where it struggles is separation. The guitars and bass occupy the same low middle throughout, and in the densest passages the bass stops being a line and becomes part of the wall. For old school death doom that is close to tradition rather than a fault, but it costs the record definition it could have used, particularly across five tracks that are otherwise so alike.
So
Worth your time, with a clear caveat: this is a debut that sounds like a debut, five songs from one seam rather than an album with an arc, and it will not surprise you after the first two. What it has instead is weight and a reason to exist, and “The Last Funeral” is good enough to carry the rest. If Aeturna write a second record as a band that has been through this rather than one that was interrupted by it, that is the one I want to hear.
This is a strikingly uniform record. Tonal centres across the five tracks span only 235 hertz, from 2448 to 2683, and the share of energy above five kilohertz varies by just over a percentage point, between 21.9 and 23.0. That is bright for death doom and it is what produces the cavernous rather than muddy impression: the reverb tails and cymbals sit well up the register. Dynamic range is narrow on four of the five, between 5.7 and 8.9 decibels from quietest to loudest passage, with only the opener “A Mirror Darkly” opening properly at 14.5. The low midrange holds steady between sixteen and eighteen percent throughout, where the guitars and bass share the same space, and the bass loses independent definition in the densest sections. The master itself is not squeezed, peaks run twelve to thirteen decibels above average on every track.
Standout tracks: The Last Funeral, A Mirror Darkly, Wreathed in Tears
