Bandcamp That ink-drawn swamp on the cover, black water and dead pines under a pale sky, tells you exactly where Schwarzwasser want to take you. This brand-new two-person project out of Saxony and Thuringia deal in melancholic atmospheric black metal squarely in the Lantlôs and Les Discrets lineage: tremolo melody, world-weary drift, and the constant push and pull between fragile clean passages and full-throated blast. von Wahn und Sehnsucht is only four tracks and about twenty-five minutes, a mini-album rather than a statement, but it announces a band worth watching.
The best thing here is a production instinct that a lot of far more established black-metal acts never learn: it breathes. In a genre that so often buries everything in one flat, hissing wall, Schwarzwasser mastered this at moderate loudness with real dynamic range, so the abrupt drops into intimate, dry acoustic passages actually land, and the drums sound like a natural kit rather than a triggered machine. “Vergänglichkeit” is the highlight, its dynamic span running from close-miked spoken intimacy to dense wall-of-sound eruption without ever squashing the master, and “Des Geistes Widerhall” opens the record with the same trick, riffs staying legible even at speed because the mix gives them room. “Weiten” and the polished, DSBM-tinged “Tage des Lichts” keep the clean-to-crushing contrast front and center.
The reservations are mostly about scale and youth. Four tracks is barely enough to judge a band on, the songwriting leans a little more on atmosphere and mood than on melodies you carry away, and in the densest blastbeat passages the low mids of guitars and keys crowd together and thin the detail. This is a debut finding its feet, not a fully formed voice, and the very things that make it promising, taste, restraint, dynamics, also leave you wanting a longer record to be sure.
von Wahn und Sehnsucht is a melancholic, dynamically alive atmospheric-black debut that already sounds more considered than most first outings, and for a self-released two-piece with no track record that is genuinely encouraging. Anyone who likes their black metal misty, post-tinged and allowed to breathe should keep an eye on this name. A small, quiet, well-made beginning.
Standout tracks: Vergänglichkeit, Des Geistes Widerhall, Tage des Lichts
