When Amenra released De Doorn in 2021, vocalist Colin H. Van Eeckhout described it as the band’s attempt to get as close to their cultural heritage as possible, lyrics entirely in the Flemish dialect, a record that felt rooted in a specific place and history rather than the universal language of heavy music. De Toorn, the EP released in March 2025 alongside its companion With Fang and Claw, is the finishing of that thought. “With De Toorn we finish what we have started with De Doorn in 2019,” Van Eeckhout says. The title shifts one letter, doorn is thorn, toorn is wrath, and the shift is everything.
“Heden,” the EP’s defining track, reportedly grew organically in the rehearsal room and set the emotional and structural template for what followed. It is the kind of Amenra song that teaches you what an Amenra song can be: slow accumulation of tension, guitars that feel more like sustained pressure than individual notes, a vocal performance that operates somewhere between lamentation and incantation. Van Eeckhout’s delivery has never been separable from the band’s physical performance practice, the hooks, the scars, the blood visible to the audience, and even on record it carries that quality of someone for whom the music is genuinely dangerous.
The EP sits in Amenra’s continuum as a transitional object. Guitarist Mathieu Vandekerckhove describes it as “a step further into the fire”, De Toorn channels De Doorn’s grief and rage, carrying the ritual forward rather than repeating it. What makes this interesting as a standalone release is its directness: where some Amenra records reward patience by withholding, De Toorn is confrontational earlier. The wrath of the title is present in the texture of the music almost immediately, before the longer arcs that the band favors begin to assemble.
Recorded in the same Belgian Ardennes studio where Mass VI was tracked, with Seth Manchester (Machines With Magnets) handling recording duties, the result shares the sonic character of that album, the production serves the performance rather than enhancing it, preserving the rawness that is central to what Amenra does. The band has described this pair of EPs as “the closure we were desperately seeking” before a new beginning. De Toorn earns that description: it sounds like something being finished.
The production retains the live-room immediacy that has always been part of Amenra’s recorded identity, the reverb is structural rather than decorative, creating the sense of a physical space that the music inhabits rather than fills. Individual instruments are identifiable but not isolated; the record sounds like a band playing together in a room, which is rarer than it should be.
Standout tracks: Heden, and the title track’s closing movement
De Toorn is a fulcrum release, it looks backward at De Doorn and forward toward Mass VII with equal clarity. Thirty years into their existence, Amenra still make records that feel like they cost something to create. That cost is audible in every track here.
