Bandcamp A total solar eclipse, corona flaring around a dead black disc, is the only image on the cover, and A Sense of Impending Doom is a record that earns that picture. Hidas are a Munich instrumental trio, and their debut is exactly what the title and the artwork promise: no vocals, no light, just the slow gathering weight of the sky going dark. Six tracks, no lyrics to parse, no frontman to follow, only riff and mood and the sense that something bad is on its way.
As a piece of pure atmosphere it mostly delivers. The band understand the doom fundamentals, the crushing tempo, the tension between stillness and collapse, and they use them. “Vakuum” is the clearest success, built on extreme contrasts, a dry, minimalist expanse in its middle that suddenly caves into a massive wall of saturated noise, and that dynamic instinct gives the record its best moments. “The Riddle” is the most balanced thing here, a warm, broad-band tube saturation carrying a genuine groove, and when the trio lock into a slow riff and let it breathe, the impending doom of the title feels real and earned.
The catch is the recording, and it’s a real one. This is a raw, lo-fi production even by underground doom standards, and while a certain murk is idiomatic and welcome in this music, Hidas push past it into genuine mud. A massive frequency pile-up in the low mids, roughly 250 to 500 Hz, slathers most of the album, guitars and bass saturating into a single indistinct fuzz-oscillation that loses nearly all articulation, and the master clamps the dynamics flat on the densest tracks. “Dynger” opens the record sounding like an uncorrected cellar rehearsal, and too often the riffs you can feel are riffs you can’t quite hear. There’s a difference between raw and unresolved, and this sits on the wrong side of it more than it should.
A Sense of Impending Doom is a heavy, atmospheric, genuinely oppressive instrumental doom debut from a band with a real feel for weight and dread, let down by a mix so murky it buries some of its own best ideas. The rawness is part of the appeal, but a little more definition would have let these riffs land the way they clearly want to. A promising, crushing start, best heard loud and forgiven its fog.
Standout tracks: Vakuum, The Riddle, Splint
