Romantic Black Metal. It’s a word combination that, at first glance, feels off – at least to me. Black Metal is anything but romantic. It is raw, filthy, ugly, and dark. It is the music of cold caves, ashen skies, and that suffocating sense that everything is meaningless. There is little room for romance in that world.
And yet, not everyone agrees. Take Empillarist, a project from Chile, who deliberately labels his music as Romantic Black Metal. For him, romance is not synonymous with syrupy love songs or rose-tinted clichés, but rather a reference to the Romantic era in 19th-century art. And that makes for a very different story.
Romanticism was about feeling rather than reasoning. It was the age of melancholy, of overwhelming encounters with nature where humankind stood small before the sublime, of longing for something unattainably greater, and of finding beauty in the threat of storms, mountains, and darkness. And I have the sense that these are precisely the elements Empillarist seeks to capture in his music.
With the piano taking a central role, multi-instrumentalist Errant Grief immediately grabs your attention. His music is a strange yet fascinating collision of styles: on the one hand, the aggressive shrieks, relentless rhythms, and unyielding tremolo riffs that unmistakably breathe Black Metal; and cutting through it all, again and again, that piano lurking like a shadow. It doesn’t sound neat or classical, but rather ominous and subterranean, as if constantly reminding the listener that beneath all this violence lies a deep melancholy.
That tension between rawness and melody gives Errant Grief a very distinct character. Where many Black Metal bands use piano or keyboards to create a symphonic, sometimes bombastic atmosphere, he wields it far more subtly, almost venomously. It seeps between the layers of guitar and drums like a ghost, gripping the listener by the throat at the very moments you least expect it.
And then there are the acoustic guitar passages, sudden breaks in the fury. They have something ancient, something earthy and powerful, inevitably recalling Bathory during the Blood Fire Death era. That same sense of heroism and mystique, but filtered through a much darker lens. Here it becomes clear that the late 1980s and early 1990s were formative years for Mr. Grief. Not only Bathory, but also the early Norwegian and Swedish schools resonate through his work – from Darkthrone’s primitive aggression to the atmospheric grandeur of early Emperor.
And yet, Errant Grief never comes across as a slavish imitator. The way he intertwines piano and acoustic textures with the rawness of Black Metal gives his music a romantic yet hostile charge. It feels as though he respects the legacy of the second wave, but pushes further, seeking his own sound-world where emotion and aggression do not cancel each other out, but instead sharpen one another.
Errant Grief, then, stands at the crossroads of contradictions: beauty and ugliness, melancholy and fury, tradition and experiment. The result is music that defies easy categorization – and all the more powerful for it, precisely because it refuses to let go.
85/100
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