Formed in 2014, this three-piece band with bandmembers living on different places on earth (Finland, Poland and the USA), surprised with their first EP in 2016 through W.T.C. Productions, which they followed up with two full-length albums in 2018 and 2020. Their take on Black Metal was quite different and had a strong ritualistic and unnerving character and had the power of hypnosis. Recently, again via W.T.C. Productions, they released this new EP called ‘Purge Of The Night Cloak’.
The three-some serves you with almost 23-minutes of some of the most unsettling and disturbing Black Metal. The basis is not quite the standard riff-driven Black Metal, instead it evolves around the main ingredients of Hekte Zaren’s ghastly vocals and the ambiental soundscape elements. But don’t let this fool you, though there is a lot of non-conventional stuff going on, this is by no means an ambient record. It just proves that you don’t have to sound like Gorgoroth or Darkthrone to sound equally as evil, or worse, even. Hekte Zaren offers her best vocal delivery to date, with her maniacal and possessed shrieks and groans she sounds awfully close to Cadaveria (Opera IX) on her prime work of the 90’s. But Hekte Zaren also pulls off some Diamanda Galás-like chanting that gives the EP an even more ritualistic, almost shamanic and spiritual character. The musical dynamics does the rest of the work and pushes you to the edge of sanity, going from slow and eerie soundscapes to ice cold, blistering, atonal and dissonant Black Metal riffs.
This is by no means an easy-listening Black Metal record, but something that should be experienced as a whole with full attention. When the spirit, mood and time is right, Adaestuo will be teleporting you to another world. To a nightly place that is cloaked by nightmarish, suffocatingly Lovecraftian horror.
