Bandcamp Calling a record Chapter I is a promise, and Wasteland Haze mean it literally. This is not an album with a theme, it is an audio drama with a band attached: six pieces held together by spoken narration, moving through a scorched science-fiction landscape that the Düsseldorf project has been building since 2022. The narration is not decoration either. It sits dry and forward in almost every track, and on two of them it is the only voice you get.
The consequence is a record that changes species between tracks and gets away with it more often than it should. “Sunburn” opens as slow death-doom before breaking into an uptempo charge at the one-minute mark, with a snare that sounds like wood and a mix nobody has flattened. “Better To Fall Among Crows” abandons riffs for a cold dystopian drone, lets a narrator carry three minutes, then collapses into fuzz with screaming feedback leads over the top. Then “Reincarnation” arrives and it is atmospheric black metal, tremolo and blastbeats and a shrieked vocal buried so far inside the reverb that intelligibility is clearly not the goal.
The best writing is at the back. “Handful Of Dust” is the most complete thing here, moving from ambient into a knotted groove and finishing on a genuine crescendo, and it is also the cleanest piece of engineering: high-gain riffing with actual string separation, a bass that growls instead of just filling space, growls that sit on top of the storm rather than under it. The closer “Wstlnd Messiah” gives up percussion almost entirely for synth drone, sub bass and long delayed guitar figures, and its patience earns the ending in a way the middle of the record does not always manage.
What holds it back is that the tracks do not sound like they were recorded to the same standard, even though they were. “Sunburn” and “Handful Of Dust” put you in a room with the band. “Pathfinder (The Great Hunt)” is tight, cool and weightless by comparison, a hard-edged kick driving fast double bass under orchestral synth pads, and on a record this committed to atmosphere that switch is more jarring than any of the genre changes, because it breaks the illusion that you are somewhere. The band tell us the whole album was tracked live in one room, drums and bass together and without a click, which makes that the more interesting problem: the performance is there and the mix on that one song hides it. The other recurring cost is familiar: when everything arrives at once the low mids pile up and the punch goes with them, most audibly on “Better To Fall Among Crows”.
Take it as what it says it is, the first chapter of something, made by people more interested in building a world than in fitting a shelf. It is uneven in the way ambitious first chapters usually are, and the parts that work suggest the second one could be considerably better.
The strongest thing here is that most of it has been left alone: no loudness-war mastering, drums that sound like they were recorded in a room, a dry spoken narration placed right at the front so you never lose the story. The guitars carry a grainy, sawing fuzz that keeps its note definition in the slower riffs, and the quiet ambient stretches genuinely breathe, which is what lets the heavy arrivals land. Two things pull against it. The kit does not sound consistent across the album: most tracks come across as a played performance in a room, while one is tight and weightless with a hard-edged kick under orchestral synths and sits oddly against the rest. That is a mixing difference rather than a playing one, and the band have confirmed the whole record was tracked live in a single room, drums and bass together, without a click. And in the densest passages the low mids stack up, taking the punch and the depth with them, worst on the second track where the fuzz wall swallows the drums almost entirely.
Standout tracks: Handful Of Dust, Wstlnd Messiah, Sunburn
