Nine stages. That is how many a corpse passes through in the Kuso-zu, the Buddhist paintings that follow a dead body from death to bare bone as a meditation on impermanence, and nine is the number running the machine on Goh-Ka. The stages are numbered in the tracklist. You can follow the decay on paper.
The trio that has spent more than three decades feeding black metal through whatever machine happened to be plugged in that week, Sigh, built this one with borrowed hands: released by Peaceville on 4 September 2026, it puts Frédéric Leclercq of Kreator on bass and Mike Heller on drums behind Mirai Kawashima, Dr. Mikannibal and Nozomu Wakai, with Lasse Lammert mixing and mastering at LSD Studios in Germany. It is the first new Sigh material since Shiki in 2022. The release in between, in 2025, was a re-recording of Hangman's Hymn.
Now picture the rig. A tape machine spools exorcism recordings into a sampler, the sampler fires a Hammond, the Hammond is bused into a shamisen, a hichiriki and an alto saxophone, and every cable in the patch bay was plugged in by someone who was not, at the time, entirely himself. By any sane engineering standard that signal chain should blow every fuse in the building. It holds.
That rig is the method. Black metal, progressive rock, psychedelia, Japanese folk and neoclassical runs all share one circuit here, and the result is the best Sigh album since In Somniphobia. The Hammond and the synths sit in the centre of the board rather than at its edges. Kawashima's rasp shreds the organ chords the moment they settle, and then the voices swing the other way, into layered clean singing that turns ethereal before it curdles back into a snarl.
Where the current runs hottest
"Kuso-shi 1, 2, and 3" opens the door, and at nine minutes it is a wide one: eighties synths, mid-tempo metal, Japanese folk and black metal vocals are stacked inside it, a King Crimson circuit soldered to a Celtic Frost one. It is the strongest way into the record, and it sets the rules early. Everything is allowed.
"Unputenpu" is the one you will play for other people. Effervescent and psychedelic, a jazz-inflected lead rides a bruising riff under it, the catchiest thing here. It carries the guest solo by Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth, beautifully haunting against all that bruise. This is where the laboratory switches off its extraction fans. Five minutes and change that sound like a hit single from a planet which never invented radio.
Every cable in this patch bay was plugged in by someone possessed, and the circuit still carries the current.
"Jigoku-Zoshi 2: Tokatsujigoku" does the dirty work. Three minutes long, icy and explosive, it is the reminder, parked in among the woodwinds and the extended synth solos, that this machine was first assembled to grind bone into powder. Kawashima has named Celtic Frost, Voivod, Black Sabbath and horror films among the ingredients this time. On this track the first name takes all the current.
Heller's drumming is the one part of the record nobody argues about: impossibly deft, thunderous without ever crowding the board, and the session man out of Malignancy and formerly of Fear Factory gives the contraption a steel chassis to sit on. The production holds to the same standard: exquisite, masterful, immaculate. I label every cable in my own rack twice, so a board with this many inputs makes me sweat on principle, and Lammert does not drop a channel.
Where the wiring shorts out
Not every experiment survives the bench. "Kuso-shi 7" is under two minutes of atmosphere, dispensable and unnecessary: in a sequence built to walk a body through nine stages, the seventh arrives as a pause instead of a stage. It should have been folded into its neighbours.
The larger complaint is that the record plays scattershot, every song pulling a different way, and it is easy to end up lost inside it. That is honest, and half right. Goh-Ka is no entry point, and fifty eight minutes of this much circuitry will fry a first-time listener the way a fully loaded patch bay fries a trainee on day one. But the scatter is the design. The nine stages are the grid, and every detour plugs back into it.
Which is why the closer matters. "Kuso-shi 8 and 9 / Mettaijakujo" runs past eleven minutes and splits the room in two: heard one way, it pulls every thread on the record together into a proper finale; heard another, it plays as an uneasy medley that never reaches the earlier peaks. The finale wins that argument. A decomposition cycle ends in bone rather than fireworks, and eleven minutes spent gathering every loose cable into one welded joint is the ending this concept asks for, even if "Unputenpu" remains the better song.
Who should plug in
So, the invoice. Goh-Ka is a laboratory record built on a meditation about rot, and it runs a core trio, a guest rhythm section, a shamisen and an Opeth solo through one board without a blown fuse anywhere in the main signal path. The single dead channel is a two-minute interlude. If you want black metal that stays in its lane, skip this and lose nothing you came for. If you want to hear what happens when someone feeds exorcism tape into a sampler and the machine starts composing back, this is the record to hear it on, and it sits near the top of a catalogue that has never been short of strange.