Bandcamp The Maquis were the guerrilla fighters who resisted Franco’s dictatorship in the mountains of Catalonia and across Spain. Some of them held out for decades after the Civil War ended, hiding in forests, running supply lines, refusing to accept that the fight was over. El Batec dels Maquis, the heartbeat of the Maquis, is the debut album from Sotabosc, a Barcelona band that sings exclusively in Catalan and roots itself in an explicitly anti-fascist ethos. The title is not metaphor. It is memory.
The album has an unusual origin. Three of the four tracks began life as compositions by Xavi Forne for Ulmus, his dark folk project. Acoustic, instrumental, intimate. Sotabosc, formed in 2023 with Oscar Linares and Manel Song of Syberia, took those sketches and rebuilt them as atmospheric black metal, adding vocalist David Rodriguez (Arna) and bassist Gerard Serrano. The result is music that carries the structural DNA of folk within the body of black metal. The progressions move differently than pure tremolo worship. There is a circularity to the riffs, a sense of return rather than escalation, that reflects the folk origins.
“Freyja” is the clearest example. Originally an Ulmus composition, it runs under five minutes and moves through two stanzas of Catalan lyrics that invoke a figure of iron and fire: “Heus aci la dama de ferro i foc, sagna la guerra amb furor i xoc.” The lady of iron and fire, bleeding war with fury and shock. The post-rock textures from Linares and Song’s work in Syberia surface here, the guitars layering clean tones under the distortion rather than replacing them.
The title track and closer, “El batec dels Maquis / Records vius en la foscor” (living memories in the darkness), runs seventeen and a half minutes and is the album’s rawest piece. Unlike the three transformed folk tracks, this one was written from scratch as Sotabosc, and it shows. The structure is less circular, more confrontational, pushing through long passages of sustained intensity that earn the runtime. Daniel Gil’s recording at Siete Barbas Studio captures the band with a clarity that serves both the atmospheric passages and the heavier sections.
“Des del sotabosc mirem amb desconfianca l’ombra de la ciutat,” the band writes in their bio. From the undergrowth, we look with distrust at the shadow of the city. The perspective is literal and political: the forest as refuge, the city as threat, the undergrowth as the space where resistance persists unseen. On Dunk! Records, a label better known for post-rock and post-metal, Sotabosc are an outlier in the best sense. They bring something the roster does not have and make it fit without compromise.
The production balances atmospheric breadth with black metal intensity. The guitars layer tremolo patterns over post-rock textures, creating density in the mid-range without losing the melodic content. The bass provides a warm foundation, and the drums shift between blast beats and more measured, post-rock-influenced patterns. The mix gives the vocals space within the wall of guitars rather than burying them. The seventeen-minute closer is well-paced dynamically, moving through distinct sections of varying intensity without losing cohesion. Daniel Gil’s recording at Siete Barbas Studio achieves a sound that is raw enough for black metal credibility and clean enough for the post-rock passages to breathe.
Standout tracks: “El batec dels Maquis / Records vius en la foscor” for the seventeen minutes that justify the album’s entire premise. “Freyja” for the most successful folk-to-black-metal transformation, where the original’s DNA is still audible under the distortion.
Four tracks and forty-something minutes. A debut album built on recomposed folk songs and a seventeen-minute anthem for dead guerrillas, sung in Catalan by a band from Barcelona on a Belgian post-rock label. Nothing about El Batec dels Maquis follows a template, and that is exactly why it works. The undergrowth is watching.
