Bandcamp Wolvennest do not write songs so much as summon them. The Brussels collective, active since 2015 and built around the ritual atmospheres of Shazzula’s voice, mellotron and theremin, deal in a hypnotic occult psych that sits where krautrock’s motorik pulse, doom’s weight and post-punk’s cold drive all meet. Procession, their latest for the Belgian label Consouling Sounds, is eleven tracks and a long, deliberate arc, and the gold-on-black cover, two vulture-headed celebrants raising ritual daggers beneath an all-seeing eye, tells you the register precisely: this is ceremony, not entertainment. Give it the dark and the time it asks for and it genuinely transports.
The band’s method is patience, the slow build from a whisper to a wall, and the production understands that completely. Almost nothing here is brickwalled, and the record breathes as a result, which is the whole reason the rituals land. “Purple Poison” is the clearest example, a transparent, organic mix with real dynamics carrying it from an intimate clean intro to a massive main section, the drums natural and spatial, nothing squeezed flat at the mastering stage. “Burial” does the same across a two-minute atmospheric opening before the heavy turn, the mastering holding back on loudness so the drama actually registers, and the eight-minute “Tarantism” (feat. Hekte Zaren) is the hypnotic centrepiece, un-triggered drums with a round, deep kick and a wide, room-lit space that no loudness-war master would have allowed. Time and again Wolvennest set a mantra spinning and let it grow teeth.
It is the textures layered over that pulse that make it more than a groove exercise. Theremin and mellotron drift through the fog, the guitars move from clean, chorus-lit arpeggios into a saturated but legible wall, and Shazzula rides the whole thing with an incantatory presence that gives the album its centre of gravity. “Décharné” and “Damnation” both work that clean-to-crushing contrast to strong effect, and only occasionally, on “The Shadow on your Side” and “Things that Breathe are Death,” does the low-mid region overload or the top end lose a little air. Across eleven tracks that is a remarkably low error rate for music this dense and this long.
Procession is an immersive, confident, genuinely transporting record from a band who have spent a decade refining exactly this, and it rewards the full, uninterrupted, lights-low listen it demands. It is occult psych that earns the label through atmosphere and dynamics rather than costume, and the production is a quiet masterclass in letting heavy music breathe. Anyone who lives where Goatess, Jess and the Ancient Ones or the more ritual end of Oranssi Pazuzu meet will fall straight in. Light a candle, turn it up, and follow the procession all the way down.
Standout tracks: Tarantism, Purple Poison, Burial
