Twenty-five months after Mirage, on 25 October 2024, the masked Portuguese collective that had spent three album cycles filed under black metal by everyone except, increasingly, itself handed Season of Mist its fourth full-length: a white sleeve, ten songs, fifty minutes and forty-eight seconds of music and, for the first time on any of its records, a clean singing voice. Gaerea had served notice in April with "World Ablaze". Coma carries out the threat. Within its opening minutes the record tears the black metal patch off its own jacket and never sews it back on, while keeping the tremolo, the blast beat and the howl stitched into the lining.
The genealogy is short and fast. Born under masks, introduced by a self-titled EP in November 2016, raised on Transcending Obscurity with Unsettling Whispers in June 2018, transferred to the French label for Limbo in July 2020 and carried by Mirage onto stages on both sides of the Atlantic, the band has delivered a full-length every two years with the regularity of a printing press. This one passed through the same trusted hands: Miguel Tereso recorded it at Redbox Studios and mixed and mastered it at Demigod Studios. The personnel did not stay the same. Between the two records the line-up changed, a fact the band confirmed while naming nobody, as befits a group whose faces are a trade secret. The sessions, by the singer's own account to Knotfest's Jon Garcia in an interview published on 23 October 2024, ran two or three weeks in a rural studio in Portugal, and the late-night talk with the man at the desk ended in a single agreement: "At the end, we just agreed, you mix and master it as a rock album. It needs to be big. It needs to be massive." Massive it is.
The sleeve is the key to the whole construction. The enormous eye at its centre, wrapped in a city, was drawn by Nathan Lorenzana in ballpoint pen, and Coma is assembled exactly as a ballpoint drawing is assembled: black hatching driven into the paper stroke after stroke, ink pressed hard enough to score the sheet, until whole regions of the page go dark, and then, without warning, an expanse of white left untouched. The ink is the black metal. The white paper is where the clean voices live. A ballpoint permits no eraser, and nothing on this record is taken back once it has been laid down.
The ink is the black metal. The white paper is where the clean voices live.
"The Poet's Ballet" establishes that grammar at once and at length. At seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds the longest piece on the album, it opens on bare paper, soft harmonised voices over clean guitar, before the tremolo arsenal and the blast beats arrive and black out the page; the first clean singing in the history of the band is the first voice the record offers, an act of nerve that doubles as a provocation. "Hope Shatters", chosen in July 2024 to announce the album, is the bridge laid down for the old congregation: melodic, aggressive, chaotic in the way its melodies tangle with the assault, it is the track that sits closest to the band that made Mirage, and the one a newcomer should be handed first.
The title track is the heaviest ink on the page. "Coma" opens on drums that tighten the air before anything else moves, then becomes five of the most violent minutes on the album, relentless double bass under tremolo riffs, climaxes stacked one upon another like strata of scorched earth. "World Ablaze" is the stroke drawn outside the frame. At three minutes and twenty-nine seconds the shortest track, built on a conventional song structure and a groove no hardcore band would refuse, it is the song the singer told Knotfest on 23 October 2024 "doesn't quite fit the whole scheme of the album", and the band released it first precisely because it did not fit. "Wilted Flower" lets whispered clean passages breathe between the onslaughts, while "Kingdom of Thorns" closes the book with a chain of turns in speed and tone, climbing to a crescendo.
The clean voice is the riskiest instrument on the record: soft, harmonised and careful, it sings beside the music rather than through it. It is also the one the record cannot do without. Without that voice there is no white paper, and without white paper the drawing is a black rectangle. The real fault lies elsewhere, in a method repeated too faithfully. The hush, the clean passage, then the storm breaking in on cue: the cut lands with full force on "The Poet's Ballet", lands again on "Suspended", and by the mid-paced, brooding stretches of "Shapeshifter" it can be seen coming a bar away. Fifty minutes of ballpoint need more than one way of leaving the paper white.
Coma is the record on which Gaerea stopped asking the black metal faithful for permission, made by a band sure enough of itself to put its most fragile sound at the front of the album and its least obedient song at the front of the campaign. The tremolo loyalists give up a little ground and gain an album with a wider field of vision; the newcomers brought in by "Hope Shatters" are handed a way into the darker catalogue behind it. Passing it over costs the sight of the moment when a masked underground unit decided that its own name was a better genre than the one printed on the shelf, and drew that decision, line by line, in ink that does not come off.