Seven years is enough time for a band to be quietly written off. Zatokrev, the Basel quartet who made their name in the early 2000s grinding out some of the densest sludge-metal Europe had to offer, had not released a full-length since BIGOD in 2018. When …Bring Mirrors To The Surface arrived in August 2025, it came with a different proposition: this was not a band retreating into familiar weight, but one opening itself up, bringing in voices from the outside and asking what the music could hold.
Five of the eight tracks feature guest vocalists, and that choice defines the record’s character. “Red Storm,” which opens the album, pairs the band with vocalist Okoi Jones and C.S.R, and the result sets the template early, the riffs are still thick and punishing, the low-end still the kind that settles into your chest cavity, but there’s space carved out for something more conversational. Two voices in the room changes the dynamic. The song doesn’t release into a single cathartic moment; instead it grinds toward a shared discomfort, which turns out to be more unsettling than anything a single voice could manage.
“Blood,” featuring Inezona, is the record’s most visceral stretch, a track that lives up to its blunt title. Where “Red Storm” holds its tension, “Blood” lets it spill. The instrumental passages push harder here, and the vocal interplay that emerges in the second half gives the song an almost ritualistic quality, two perspectives orbiting the same wound. “The Only Voice” arrives immediately after and works as a deliberate counterpoint: no guests, just the band, the riff turned inward. It earns its title.
The centerpiece of the record is “Unwinding Spirits,” which features Manuel Gagneux of Zeal & Ardor. Gagneux brings the same quality he carries into his own work, an ability to inhabit music that is already dark and find a stranger, more textured darkness underneath. His presence here doesn’t overwhelm the song; it pulls it somewhere it couldn’t reach on its own. The track is the longest emotional argument on the album, and it wins the argument.
“Faint” and “Changes”, the latter featuring C.S.R again, handle the album’s middle with a lighter touch without releasing the pressure entirely. “Pearl Eyes” is the most atmospheric piece here, slow-burning in a way that feels almost meditative after everything that precedes it. Then “Deep Dark Turns Green” closes the record with the widest cast: Christopher Bennett, Zachary Livingston, and Aaron Austin share the space with Zatokrev across what amounts to a sprawling, almost orchestral finish. The title’s shift from dark to green, from absence to something living, lands as the record’s final statement, and it’s a considered one.
What holds …Bring Mirrors To The Surface together is the production. The album sounds expensive in its weight, guitars that register as physical objects, bass that doesn’t just support the low end but anchors the entire emotional logic of each track. The collaborative framework could have fragmented the record into a series of disconnected guest spots, but Zatokrev keep each piece sounding like theirs first and shared second. The guests don’t change the band; they reveal it.
Seven years is a long wait. What came back wasn’t a band playing it safe.
Standout tracks: Unwinding Spirits, Blood, Deep Dark Turns Green
