Hagel have released The Veil of Shadows, a five song EP, through Personal Records.
It is their first release since Veneration of the Black Light in 2021, and the pace is the point. The band formed in Monterrey in 1995 and have one album, one single and now one EP on the record, which over thirty one years works out at something close to silence. The Withering Tongues is out from it.
The five songs run to a little over twenty minutes and end on Echoes From Beyond The Veil, subtitled Chaconne in D Minor, which suggests the Bach piece and is a long way from where black doom usually finishes a record. Obsidian Mirrors carries the title of the EP as a subtitle, so the sequence is built rather than assembled.
Personal Records have been releasing Mexican and South American extreme metal for two decades and are the natural home for a band this far underground. What they play is black metal slowed to a doom tempo, which is a narrow seam, and one that Mexico has worked longer than most.