Bentala – Anantabhoga [Demo]

It’s not every day that you come across a Black Metal band from Indonesia, but here we are. Bentala, nice to meet you! While it’s not entirely clear when the band started, 2025 was certainly a productive year for this band that consists of a single member simply called Bentala. A demo, a 5-way split and just recently a full-length were all released in the past year, and we still have a few months to go. But it’s the very first steps of the band, the demo ‘Anantabhoga’ that is now receiving a fresh breath of life with a re-release on tape by Wolfkult Religion.

Just as Indonesia is not your everyday Black Metal nation, neither is the music on ‘Anantabhoga’ all too standard. The main basis is furiously up pace Raw Black Metal with a relentless drum pace, only seldomly broken in its monotony by more moody breaks. That by itself may not be so rare in the current scene, and neither are the heavily distorted shrieks by Bentala. What pushes the music out of the ordinary is the guitars, but mostly on how they combine with the production. The riffs are filled with a deep sense of subcutaneous melancholy that is amplified by a raw, Lo-Fi if you will, production. With the instrumentation pushed so far back, the sound and atmosphere is so suffocating that it has morphed into a dark humming that resembles cellos playing a mournful and ghastly melodic overture. Entirely fitting, the demo ends with cover of ‘Götterkrieg’ by Grausamkeit, a piano rendition that stays close to the original but fits perfectly with the overall sense of darkened sadness that the music of Bentala portrays. Together, ‘Anantabhoga’ is quite an intriguing release. With so much focus on the overall sound as opposed to the individual instruments, it has become blistering yet melancholic, in a way that  you don’t hear every day.