Endspace have a first album out. First Contact landed on 2 October through Transcending Obscurity Records and the label has put the whole of it online, nine tracks and a little under forty minutes.
Every song is a transmission. First Transmission, then Second, and so on to Ninth, the shortest of them three minutes twenty four and the longest four fifty one. Nothing else on the record is named at all.
Neither are the people who made it. The two members are credited as 040118180514 and 102119200914, both of them on vocals, guitars, synthesizers and drums, and Metal Archives has no formation year, no location and no themes for the band beyond the country. Twelve digits each, which is a length that invites a reader to try reading them as letters and does not reward it.
Transcending Obscurity, which has spent the last decade on exactly this kind of band, files the music as sci fi black metal. Metal Archives files it as atmospheric and avant garde black metal. Both are saying the same thing from different angles, and a debut that refuses to identify either party to a first contact is at least consistent with its own title. It is pressed as a digipak, catalogue TOR 270.