Year: 2025
Label: Season of Mist
Rating: 8,4 / 10
New album of DRUDKH took me by surprise in a way. DRUDKH, of course, are not DARKTHRONE, whose fans for some reason still hope to hear Black Metal from these Norwegians, but most of their listeners also expect something in the style of the first 5-6 albums every time. Personally, I have long given up all hopes for this. And then DRUDKH suddenly released "Гра тіней" - an album that smells like the notorious ”return to the roots".
Already in the long opening track, the familiar "autumnal“ synths that we heard on ”Autumn Aurora“ and ”Відчуженість" begin to sound. While the second track is gradually gaining momentum, the approach that Roman Saenko and Thurios have chosen on this album is becoming clearer. It's a mix of old hypnotic riffs with a more technical approach in the style of post-2015 material. There is no ingenious warm monotony of my favorite "Forgotten Legends", but there are many curtsies towards "Microcosmos”, "Кров у наших криницях" and other recordings of the second half of the 2000s.
The songs "Квітень" and ”Вигнання" turned out to be, perhaps, the strongest on the album. They literally don't have a single place that doesn't inspire admiration. "Опале цвітіння", in every sense the fastest thing, has several mediocre moments, and for me it revealed another characteristic feature of the album: a huge internal dynamic. Throughout their career, DRUDKH gradually moved from 2-3 riff tracks to more complex material and eventually reached “Гра тіней”, where there are really a lot of rifffs. Each song here consists of many fragments, and from time to time you can forget where it all started. Of course, with such a rich fruits of creative thought, certain ideas will have a worse quality than their neighbors. In this case, these are fast sections with blast beats. A one-dimensional fury in the vein of the first WINDSWEPT album hardly suits DRUDKH, because this band has always been able to give saturation to even the simplest-sounding ideas. But the medium-tempo pieces, as always, turned out to be more than perfect. DRUDKH imbued them with truly heartbreaking powerful sense of melancholy, beauty and tragedy.
If I'm not mistaken, the lyrics to ”Гра тіней" were written by the band itself for the first time since 2006. Unlike several previous albums, it does not touch real events - obviously, Roman decided to speak on these topics with HATE FOREST. The lyrics of "Гра тіней" are more aloof, about nature and a difficult life. But you can feel the tension in them, just like in music. For all its autumnal atmosphere, ”Гра тіней“ is unlikely to give you the opportunity for musical contemplation of horizons or for the spiritual revelation, like ”Microcosmos“ or "Відчуженість". But it's still a wonderful fusion of old and modern DRUDKH, which you can even listen to outside the lyrical context. Their best album in 10 years.
The sound of "Гра тіней" was mastered by famous Jaime Gómez Arellano, but the place of recording isn't mentioned for some reason. But there are no fundamental differences in sound compared to previous records, so I would venture to guess that it was still the same studio: Viter Music. The album was released on CD in a digipack with a 16-page booklet on rough paper. Details on a video.
