Nansarunai – Ruins of the Moonlight Temple [Reissue]

Originally unveiled in late 2022 as a digital and cassette release, ‘Ruins of the Moonlight Temple’ now returns in a lavish 2025 vinyl edition courtesy of Goatowarex. The reissue is housed in a Japanese‑style tip‑on gatefold jacket, pressed on heavyweight 180‑gram black vinyl, complete with a Japanese OBI strip — a luxury presentation for a record steeped in the shadows of “Ancient Indonesian Black Metal”.

Having reviewed Nansarunai’s debut, it’s the perfect moment to revisit the project’s second full‑length. Once again, the mastermind behind Nansarunai leads the listener into a dark, grim yet oddly magical realm of lost kingdoms and mysterious, ancient gods. These deities ruled their followers through ritual, ceremony, and traditions steeped in martial values — veneration of the king taken to the point of following him into total war and, ultimately, death. According to the press kit.

The album opens with an unsettling, ambient dark‑synth prologue: queasy in tone, oppressive in atmosphere. It feels like stepping through a portal as mocking, half‑hidden voices — human and animal alike — jeer at your intrusion, casting doubt on whether you’ll survive the nearly hour‑long journey ahead.

Then comes ‘Powerful and Damned Unseen Forces’, exploding into a hard‑hitting maelstrom of trashy‑edged guitars, relentless tremolo picking, hypnotic riffs, and crash‑cymbal‑heavy percussion. The vicious, hissing vocals ride over a storm that shifts between doomy weight, melodic passages, and sheer speed‑driven mayhem. The assault doesn’t let up with the next track, which layers even more abrasive textures and spectral wails before swerving into a cold‑blooded, lo‑fi Black Metal/Dark Synth reinterpretation of Indonesian pop song, ‘Citra Hitam’. The melody remains intact, but the sugarcoated sentiment is stripped away, replaced with pure venom.

From there, Nansarunai unleashes a relentless rollercoaster: roaring guitars, merciless percussion, and ethereal atmospheres from which riffs emerge expressing anger, aggression, regret, sorrow, and longing for an idealised past. It’s intense, harsh, and carries all the hallmarks of a cult underground classic…

Yet despite its energy and commitment, there’s a lingering sense of familiarity — many passages feel generic, and the ambient interludes resemble fantasy RPG soundtracks more than true portals to a mythical Southeast Asian underworld. The lo‑fi production, while suiting the raw aesthetic, often smothers nuance and depth, flattening the dynamics into a one‑dimensional blur. A cleaner production could restore clarity and power, though at the possible cost of losing the music’s primal, unpolished vigour.

As it stands, Nansarunai seems to be approaching a creative crossroad: continue refining this stripped, minimalist approach — at the risk of repetition — or evolve the sound and broaden the vocal range to keep the vision fresh. Either way, ‘Ruins of the Moonlight Temple’ reaffirms the project’s uncompromising spirit, and in this deluxe form, it’s a striking artefact for those drawn to Black Metal’s most arcane fringes…