Hexerei – Realms…..

Sentient Ruin Laboratories is a California-based underground label, founded in 2012, that specializes in extreme and experimental music across metal, noise, industrial, and other abrasive genres. Guided by a mission to uncover obscure and challenging sounds, it seeks out boundary-pushing artists from around the world, prioritizing authenticity and intensity over commercial appeal. Releases are often limited-edition physical formats, catering to dedicated collectors within the global extreme music underground. Notable acts oct on their roster are : Noose Rot, Abstracter, Vessel of Iniquity. And all of them are of extreme high quality. For those who aren’t familiar with this label.

Hexerei is a Finnish Black Metal act steeped in the raw, chaotic tradition of the genre’s most uncompromising progenitors. This is their second full-length, the follow-up to ‘Ancient Evil Spirits’ from 2021. Their sound is primitive, abrasive, and deliberately hostile — a venomous blend of old-school Black Metal in the vein of early Mayhem, Negative Plane, Lucifixion and Katharsis, laced with elements of sonic destruction that push it toward the realm of “anti-music”. Hexerei dwell in territories of occultism, madness, and metaphysical horror. Their work channels imagery of delirium, world inversion, and absolute malignancy — not as metaphor, but as an immersive psychic assault.

Each release is conceived as a ritualistic curse, a gateway to bedlam, and a rejection of musical “decency” in favor of pure, unfiltered violence and evilness. The music aligns with the underground Black Metal aesthetic: stark, grim, and ritualistic. Expect shadow-drenched photography, corpsepaint, and occult symbols, all reinforcing their identity as a “terrorizing Black Metal coven” devoted to spreading grotesque sound as a form of spiritual and psychological warfare.

In both sound and presentation, Hexerei stand as modern instigators of the most necrotic, malign strain of extreme music. Approach with caution, this ‘Realms….’.

It gets a total score in my book and hopefully Sentient Ruin Laboratories keep up the high standards.

‘Realms…..’, the second full-length from Finnish Black Metal entity Hexerei, is a feral plunge into the most uncompromising depths of the genre.

Across five tracks and forty minutes, the band delivers a venomous, psyche-scarring assault designed as a portal to pure chaos. With intentionally degraded sound quality, a regressive rejection of conventional songwriting, and an embrace of “antimusic” in its most crippled and primeval form, Hexerei strips Black Metal back to its raw, ancestral essence — a conduit for unrestrained violence and evil.

Drawing on the legacy of acts like Cultes Des Ghoules, Katharsis, and Concrete Winds, ‘Realms’….. cements Hexerei as the modern torchbearers of grotesque, occult sound terror. The result is a work that feels both grand and inscrutable — a deliberate act of sonic malignancy that exists to unsettle, overwhelm, and return extreme music to its most corrosive origins. Black metal with cojones, droogies!