Within a Turkish scene that is gaining increasing recognition in Europe, Goetia is a new darkwave band that has released several singles since 2025, exploring themes of ‘occultism, inner conflicts and existential decline’. Their music is characterised by strong influences of EBM and aggro-tech, giving it an industrial edge, alongside the use of Turkish vocals. Earlier this month, Goetia took the step of releasing a full-length album, entitled Saligia – this medieval Latin acronym refers to the seven deadly sins, and the short album does indeed comprise seven tracks.
Here we discover a cold and highly tense musical world, making extensive use of beats over binary rhythms with fast tempos, featuring minimalist structures designed to be haunting, and vocals vibrating with sharp tension. It’s not far removed from what the Techno Body Music (TBM) scene used to produce – a scene that’s somewhat faded these days – but with Turkish vocals that offer a welcome change and layers of analogue synths in the background. It works: you feel the music’s danceable power whilst frequently feeling trapped by the conflicts running through it. Mazal works particularly well in this vein, with the synthesiser blending perfectly with the rhythm and vocals to create a relentless result.
It is therefore tempting to view Saligia as a well-crafted album in a style to which our ears are accustomed; yet there is more to it than that: in the second half of the album, the sequence Nektar / Haris / Teufel suddenly transports us to far darker atmospheres without losing any of its rhythmic drive. After a classic introduction, Nektar delights us with the sudden emergence of its muffled sounds, creating a spellbinding atmosphere; Haris creates a lovely contrast between the call of distant notes and the rough pounding in the foreground before a successful break; Teufel, finally, goes even further thanks to its alarming sample and its gothic theatrics, not unlike Das Ich... We weren’t expecting it, and this register suits Goetia down to the ground!
Saligia is therefore a promising debut album from Goetia: rich, well-crafted and surprising, and likely to appeal to a wide range of listeners within the dark music scene.
