Thirty one years in, Hagel have changed the voice at the front. The Veil of Shadows, out on 6 November through Personal Records, is the first release with Iveth Herrera singing lead. She joined the Monterrey band in 2024, and the arrangement frees Iván Saldaña to concentrate on the guitar instead of splitting the job.
The record is five tracks and about twenty one minutes on CD, which the band call a mini-album rather than stretching it into something it is not. The Withering Tongues is out ahead of it. The writing stays with the atmospheric, melodic black and doom metal the band have played since the nineties, and works through dreamlike imagery, ritual landscapes and obsidian mirrors.
Hagel were founded in Monterrey in 1995 by the guitarist Carlos Velázquez and the keyboardist and vocalist Luis Galindo, and have taken their time: one full-length, Veneration of the Black Light, came in 2021, five years after the band began releasing again. On that pace a mini-album with a new singer is not a small event.