“Wranger Wanen” is the debut full-length album by Belgian Black Metal project Brakel. It was released on June 7, 2024, via Signal Rex and comprises nine tracks spanning approximately 27 minutes.
Brakel is a solo Black Metal project hailing from Belgium. The name references the Flemish municipality of Brakel, hinting at its East Flanders roots and the project’s connection to local landscapes and folklore.
The first appearance of Brakel came with the demo ‘Akelven’, released in 2022 through Final Agony Records. It introduced a sound that melded haunted dark ambient passages with demented raw Black Metal riffs and hateful power-electronics textures, immediately drawing attention in the underground tape scene. Other than that, the identity of the musicians remains secret.
Brakel blend raw Black Metal with power-electronics and industrial overtones. One can note affinities with Black Cilice, Candelabrum, Xasthur, Nidernes and the Signal Rex-endorsed Clandestine Circle of Aldebaran. The album’s sound is simultaneously hateful, ghoulish, and alien—its “in-the-red decibels” and mechanistic pulses evoking expressionist horror akin to an industrial-era nightmare of medieval proportions.
An absolutely vile and degrading mixture between haunted dark ambient, demented and old school raw Black Metal, and hateful power electronics is being poured over you when listening to ‘Wranger Wanen’. It’s suffocating, menacing, repulsive, yet it draws you into its pitch-black vortex at the same time.
Brakel’s lyrics center on decaying Flemish landscapes, archaic folklore, existential guilt, and expressionist horror, all delivered in an old Flemish dialect that feels ritualistic and uncanny. For instance, the track ‘Kwadeplas’ invokes legends of a cursed pond whose waters swallow wanderers by moonlight. ‘Zonderling En Drang’ (Outcast and Urge) portrays a tormented soul driven by compulsions it cannot name or quell. And the track ‘Grauwkraal’ describes an abandoned farmstead under ashen skies, its barns echoing with lost voices.
I can understand why Signal Rex decided to sign Brakel – their unique apocalyptic vision on Black Metal and utterly abrasive aesthetics will undoubtedly appeal to the extremists of the genre. In my book it gets a total score. Do check this one out.
