Bandcamp The Damask story starts with Sautrus. Weno Winter, vocalist of the long-running Polish progressive-stoner trio, has been turning over a parallel pile of ideas for the better part of two decades. Three Times Ten, released May 19 on damaskband.bandcamp.com with a 200-copy limited CD digipak, is the project where those ideas finally land. Founded in 2025, Damask is Winter (vocals, guitar, mix, master), Adrian Jegorow (bass), Jakub Modrzejewski (solo guitar), and Paweł Łach (drums), and the eight-track / thirty-five-minute album moves through more stylistic territory than most debut LPs even attempt.
The frame Winter himself names is “repetition, tension, and release”, and the running order does the work. Forsaken Me opens at a mid-tempo prog-doom shape with the clean vocals placed forward, almost hovering above the rhythm section; She Is My Butterfly is the album’s most fully-arranged piece, the kind of long-form acoustic-into-electric build with multi-tracked clean choirs that Anathema or later Katatonia would recognise as their vocabulary; All You Need Is drops into the heaviest territory on the album, fuzzed guitars and a closer-to-buried mix that feels like a different band for three minutes; The Very First Moments Of Consciousness is the album’s quietest piece, acoustic guitar and atmospheric vocals, with strings sketched in the background.
The Back Half
The second half opens with Witness Of Lie, the most successfully dynamic cut on the record: live-feeling drums, theatrical clean vocals with stacked choruses, and proper contrast between the verse and the chorus instead of a one-level wall. Horrah turns to the album’s heaviest doom mode with long-held guttural screams placed deep in a reverb-heavy mix, atmospheric rather than confrontational. Master leans psychedelic-stoner with a clean lead vocal and a long fluid lead-guitar passage that gives Modrzejewski the most room of any track on the record. Eye In The Sky closes the album with a wide-stereo, heavily-tracked production that lands somewhere between dramatic prog-doom and a more modern arena-sized closer.
The thematic spine that Winter has named — religious fascination and fanaticism, the fear of death, dishonesty and self-deception, the difficulty of understanding the world — sits in the lyric sheet rather than in any individual riff. Across the eight tracks the songs operate as discrete short stories, which is the right shape for a project pulling from twenty years of accumulated material; whether Three Times Ten coheres as a record rather than a sequence is the question the band’s second album will need to answer.
Production
The production is mostly to the album’s credit. Winter mixed and mastered the record himself, and the choice to leave dynamic range intact (rather than chase modern brick-walled loudness) is exactly right for the acoustic-into-doom arc the songs reach for. The live-room drum sound on Witness Of Lie and Master lets the band breathe; the cleaner passages on The Very First Moments Of Consciousness and the She Is My Butterfly opening have genuine spatial depth.
The trade-offs sit where you’d expect them on a self-produced debut. The clean vocals occasionally float too far above the instrument bed (the opener and the closer most clearly); the heaviest cuts (All You Need Is, parts of Horrah) accumulate frequency stacking in the low-mids where guitars and bass blur into a single saturated band; the closing track’s wall-of-sound mastering levels the dynamic argument the writing has been building. None of those are project-killers. They’re the standard cost of a one-man self-produced first record, and the album’s best moments (Witness Of Lie, She Is My Butterfly, Master) are strong enough to earn the rest of the runtime.
Eight tracks, self-mixed and -mastered by Weno Winter, with the production choice that defines the album: contemporary loudness avoided in favour of real dynamic range. The mix philosophy shifts across the runtime — live-feeling drums and organic room sound on the rock cuts (“Witness Of Lie,” “Master”), spatial-depth acoustic-and-string textures on the quieter pieces (“The Very First Moments Of Consciousness,” opening of “She Is My Butterfly”), heavier fuzz-wall textures on the doom cuts (“All You Need Is,” “Horrah,” “Eye In The Sky”). Guitars carry varied saturation across the album; bass is articulate and knurrig in the rhythm-section pocket on the better-mixed tracks, blurring with the kick on the densest. Drums have natural snare body and unprocessed kick attack throughout. Vocals (predominantly clean, with guttural screams on “Horrah” and multi-tracked choirs on “She Is My Butterfly” and “Witness Of Lie”) sit forward in the mix; on a few tracks they read slightly isolated from the instrument bed rather than embedded. The closer leans most aggressively brick-walled and is the production outlier of the record.
Standout tracks: Witness Of Lie for the live-feeling dynamic argument that’s the album’s most fully realised cut. She Is My Butterfly for the long-form acoustic-into-electric build with stacked clean choirs. Master for the psychedelic-stoner lead-guitar showcase that gives Modrzejewski his moment.
Worth your time if you appreciate Polish prog-doom that takes its acoustic-to-heavy dynamic vocabulary seriously and isn’t afraid of a thirty-five-minute runtime built from short stories rather than a single arc. A confident debut that has the writing in place and now needs a second album to consolidate the production. Three stars, with the next record in clear view.
