Bandcamp The cover of Distant Echoes is a black and white photograph of two people standing on a beach, backs to the camera, looking at the water. No logo, no title, no corpse paint. For a band from Odesa releasing their debut in 2025, that image does more work than any amount of grim iconography would. It is a coastline that is also a front, an ordinary afternoon that is not ordinary, and it sets up the record’s actual subject, which the band describe as the state of a person’s mind rather than the state of a nation.
That distinction matters, because it would be easy and lazy to review this album as a document instead of as music. Mortui Vultus formed in 2022 and are unsigned, and the temptation to grade on context is obvious. They deserve better than that. So: as music, the strongest thing on here is “Outmoon,” four and a half minutes that put the screams dry and hard at the very front of the mix and let the clean guitars in the intro and middle section ring out with real physical presence. It is the most direct song on the record and the only one that does not hide. “Klekit” is the other keeper, built on delay-soaked clean passages that snap into sudden violence, with a growling, dominant bass that actually leads rather than just filling the bottom.
The opener, “Mara,” is the boldest swing and the most uneven. It spends a long stretch on spoken word and field recording before it detonates, and the detonation is genuinely startling. But once the wall arrives it stays, and the track spends its back half in a single unchanging texture, which turns a striking idea into a long one. “Susurration” closes the album with twelve and a half minutes that repeat the trick, wide warm ambient stretches against total saturation, and it is the clearest illustration of both what this band can do and what is holding them back.
What is holding them back is the master. The rawness is not the problem: buried vocals, unreadable guitars and a bass that reads as pressure rather than as notes are all native to atmospheric and depressive black metal, and nobody comes to this genre for note-perfect separation. The problem is loudness. The heavy sections have been pushed so hard into the limiter that the drums lose their attack precisely when they most need it, and a record built entirely on the contrast between quiet and overwhelming ends up flattening its own best weapon. On “Susurration,” the ambient passages breathe beautifully and the eruption that follows arrives pre-crushed. The band engineered the dynamic and the mastering threw it away.
Distant Echoes is five songs and about thirty-seven minutes, made by a young band with a clear emotional centre, a good ear for the quiet half of the quiet-loud equation, and no label behind them. It is not a great record. It is a real one, with two songs worth returning to and a closing statement that a better mastering job would have turned into something considerably harder to shake off. If they find someone who understands that headroom is not a luxury, the next one could be a serious album.
Raw, unsigned post-black metal from Odesa, five tracks built almost entirely on the swing between wide ambient space and total saturation. The screams sit buried in reverb as texture rather than as a lead voice, the guitars are fuzzed past the point of note definition and the bass reads as pressure, all of which is native to atmospheric and depressive black metal rather than a fault. The best track is “Outmoon,” which breaks the pattern by putting the screams dry and dominant at the front and letting the clean guitars in the intro and mid-section ring out with real presence. “Klekit” pairs delay-soaked clean passages with sudden violence and a growling, leading bass. The opener “Mara” takes the boldest swing, a long spoken and field-recorded intro before a startling eruption, but then holds one texture for its back half. The real limitation is the mastering: the heavy sections are driven so hard into the limiter that the drum transients collapse exactly where the contrast should hit hardest, and the twelve-minute closer “Susurration” gives away its own dynamic that way. Strong ideas, undersold by the loudness.
Standout tracks: Outmoon, Klekit, Susurration
