Macocha release Pale Heart on 23 October, four years after forming and two after the self titled debut. The name comes from the sinkhole near Blansko, the deepest abyss in central Europe, and is pronounced closer to ma-tso-kha than to anything an English speaker would guess.
Eight songs, and the band have never been willing to sit inside one genre. Black metal, hardcore, death metal, sludge and doom all turn up, which is easy to say about any heavy band and in this case is audible in the structure: the opener, "Idiocracy", starts in blackened fury, drops into a slow HM2 riff, and then goes somewhere melodic and melancholy, all inside five minutes.
That is the pattern rather than the exception. Each song on the record is built to turn at least once, which is a decision with a cost: nothing here works as a single, and a listener who wants one riff repeated will not find it.
Still unsigned, and the record comes out independently. For a band four years old with two albums in the Czech underground, that is the normal arrangement rather than a complaint.