“Una Tarra Ci He” opens with bowed cello and layered choral vocals, swelling into something between a hymn and a wake. Timpani enters low and deliberate, building weight beneath the harmonies. It’s less than two minutes long and it does more scene-setting than most bands manage in ten. By the time the track dissolves, you know what kind of record this is, one that earns its heaviness by starting from silence.
“Talamh Lom” detonates that silence immediately. Nathan Irvine and Ashley Irwin lock into tremolo lines that cascade over Anais Chareyre-Mejan’s blast-beat drumming, while Andy Ennis shifts between blackened shrieks and a deeper, almost spoken register. The co-writing credit with former guitarist Bryn Mills shows: the riff architecture has a compositional density that rewards close listening. Around the 2:20 mark the song shifts. Crunchy guitars and cello settle in alongside softer, cleaner vocals, breathing space carved out of the storm, before the final third pulls everything back under.
“Footsteps II” runs nine and a half minutes and moves through at least four distinct movements. John Wilson’s piano introduction gives way to a slow build that brings in Raul Andueza’s cello alongside Chareyre-Mejan’s own. The interplay between the two cellos, one rooted in classical phrasing, the other pulling toward something more textural, gives the mid-section a harmonic richness that pure guitar records rarely achieve. Kacper Lewandowski’s additional guitar work threads through the background, adding melodic counterpoints that surface and disappear without ever cluttering the mix.
The title track strips things back. Seven minutes built around a single melodic idea that the band turns and reshapes until it becomes something else entirely. Ennis’s vocals carry more vulnerability here than anywhere else on the record, a rawness to his delivery that the production wisely doesn’t try to smooth out. Chareyre-Mejan pulls back from the double bass that drives most of the record, letting the song breathe on its own terms before the blasting returns for the final push.
“My Tomb Beneath The Tide” closes the album with Sarah Fielding’s guest vocals adding a new dimension to the vocal palette. The track builds patiently toward its climax, the guitars layering until the sound becomes almost orchestral. The final minutes pull back to cello and voice before the last crescendo, a structural mirror of the album’s opening, silence reclaiming what volume borrowed.
Chris Fielding’s production is the unsung anchor of this record. Mixed at Foel Studio and mastered by Mike Lamb, the sound is wide and detailed without ever feeling clinical. The cellos sit naturally alongside the distortion, the drums have genuine room tone, and the vocal layers, clean harmonies stacked against black metal shrieks, occupy distinct spaces without competing. The low end has definition without muddiness, which is particularly evident on the longer tracks where bass guitar and cello share frequency range. Headphones reveal small details: reverb tails on the clean guitar sections, the breath between vocal phrases, the way the timpani in the opener decays into the silence before track two arrives.
Standout tracks: Talamh Lom, Footsteps II, My Tomb Beneath The Tide
Domhain, Irish for “deep”, is a project that lives up to its name without making a spectacle of the depth. Four Belfast musicians with roots across the Irish metal scene, building something that draws on post-black metal, blackgaze, and atmospheric black metal without becoming a genre exercise. That Chareyre-Mejan handles drums, vocals, cello, and the album’s visual design speaks to a band where roles blur and the music benefits from it. In Perfect Stillness is their most accomplished work yet. 35 minutes that know exactly when to rage and when to let the cello do the talking.
