Bandcamp Zorza is the Polish word for the aurora, and the cover of Twilight of the Golden Star leans all the way into that romance: a pale figure adrift on cloud, an owl gliding beneath, a moon hung in a painterly night sky. It is a symbolist painting more than a metal cover, and it tells you what Eryk Lange and Kacper Bartkowiak are reaching for on their second full-length. This is post-black metal in the emotional, Austrian-adjacent tradition, and the duo underline the lineage by opening the record with two tracks that feature Michael Kogler of Harakiri for the Sky and Karg on vocals. When those first songs surge, they carry the widescreen ache that scene does so well.
The writing, for the most part, earns the ambition. “Twilight of the Golden Star” and “My Wounds” both build from airy, spacious openings into full-band surges, and the record is smart about where it places its calm. “Zorza III” is the clearest proof of what the band can do when they trust silence, a dark-ambient interlude anchored by a deep sub-bass pad and scattered industrial ticks, no guitars or screams at all, that finally lets the album breathe in three dimensions before a reverbed piano takes the melody. “The Devil Wears Well” is the other high point, and tellingly it is the track where the mix sounds most alive, a dirty, mid-focused churn that still leaves the snare its crack and the bass its growl. The Polish duo clearly know how to write this music, and the anti-theocratic streak running through titles like “Against Theocracy” gives the fury somewhere to point.
The problem is what happens to all that ambition at the mastering stage. Across the heavy passages Twilight is pressed for loudness hard enough that the biggest moments lose their physical weight, the dynamics flattening exactly when they should be crushing you. The bass spends most of the record smeared into an undefined low-end fundament, its string definition swallowed by the saturated guitars, and the drums lean on a triggered, clicky kick and harsh, over-compressed cymbals that sit too clean against the murk. This is worth being precise about, because raw production is part of black metal’s language and often a virtue. What holds this record back is not tape hiss or cavernous murk, it is the opposite, a modern, brickwalled, over-edited sheen that steals the air from the loud parts and leaves the harsh vocals sitting a touch too dry and loud on top of everything.
So Twilight of the Golden Star lands as a frustrating near-miss, a genuinely well-written atmospheric black metal record whose production keeps undercutting its best instincts. When the band step back, on “Zorza III” and the closing stretch, you hear the album it could have been, one with the space to let its aurora actually glow. As it stands there is real beauty here for anyone willing to listen past the ceiling the master imposes, and enough promise that the next one is worth waiting for, ideally with a hand less heavy on the limiter.
Atmospheric post-black metal in the emotional, Austrian-adjacent mould, with Harakiri for the Sky and Karg guesting on the first two tracks. The writing is strong and knows how to place its calm, but the mastering is the recurring problem: heavy passages are pressed for loudness until the biggest moments lose their physical weight and the dynamics flatten. The bass is mostly smeared into an undefined low end, its definition swallowed by saturated guitars, and the drums lean on a triggered clicky kick and harsh over-compressed cymbals. The high points are where the record breathes: “Zorza III,” a guitar-free dark-ambient interlude on a deep sub-bass pad that finally opens up three-dimensional space, and “The Devil Wears Well,” the one heavy track where the mix stays alive with a dirty mid churn that keeps the snare its crack and the bass its growl. Not idiomatic black-metal rawness but modern brickwalled over-production, which is what keeps holding the atmosphere back.
Standout tracks: Zorza III, The Devil Wears Well, Twilight of the Golden Star
