Hexvessel, the Finnish band founded in 2009 by vocalist and guitarist Mat McNerney — formerly of the Norwegian metal group Dødheimsgard and currently fronting the psychedelic post-punk band Grave Pleasures — is set to release its new album, Nocturne, on June 13, 2025, via Prophecy Productions. Originally rooted in the mysterious essence of poetically dreamlike folk, Hexvessel’s work has grown over the years to include an increasingly haunted black metal sound, creating a unique ambience that blends folk, doom and atmospheric black metal in a perfect balance of beauty, strength and fragility.
Benjamin König is once again the creator of the sublime illustration for Nocturne: a drawing that appears as a negative of the previous Polar Veil cover; pastel colors give way to black and white, while the rather serene aura of the scene is transformed this time into a horrific, snowy dream. This new opus, inspired by the creation of a work for the Roadburn Festival 2024 (originally entitled Music for Gloaming: A Nocturne), is in the same vein as the previous one, but more intense, accomplished and even darker.
In its early stages, Nocturne was conceived as a strong, unique work forming a whole, initially made for live performance. It was then reworked and improved for a more complex studio version, with the integration of quieter, ambient beats, acoustic string instruments and a grand piano that could not have been envisaged at a festival. Nevertheless, there remains a very strong unity forming a tale with a dark but coherent arc, for assimilation in essence in a single listening with its twists and turns, its anxieties and its contemplative breathing times.
The album is a rite of passage to another world, a mirror world of our own in which everything is crueler, colder and foggier, to be tamed and reborn in another way or form. From Sapphire Zephyrs, the second track following an augural piano opening, a spectral universe comes to life before our very eyes, in which each note seems to counterbalance the previous one in a dance of just the right balance between rage and fragility, against a masterful epic backdrop that destabilizes as much as it reassures. Hexvessel breaks the codes, infusing icy melancholy with mystical swirls of sharp guitars, dressed as much in raucous screams as in heart-rending clear and almost lyrical voice sometimes. The more complex and varied compositions (we can easily dance to the notes of Spirit Masked Wolf after a deep meditation on the more medieval tunes of Inward Landscapes) will, if listened to separately, suit every mood.
Nature, in its immensity, is omnipresent in this musical spectrum. It is first a place of hostile perdition, then the cradle that gathers us and with which we become one in the darkness, for a sacred spiritual awakening. Through his lyrics, the singer seems to be the spokesman for his natural, self-evident poetry. The death that drips from each syllable is reflected in the starlight of this enveloping night. Nights Tender Reckoning was inspired by a recent discovery in China of two skeletons frozen in an eternal embrace in a tomb over 1500 years old. Which one died first? Which allowed himself to die at the side of his love, to continue this embrace forever in the afterlife? While Mother Destroyer plunges us into the more concrete grief of an ecological catastrophe and the forgetfulness of respect for our earth, which will soon be our sepulchre, this album is one of this year's most poetic journeys. In the black metal spheres, vocals have never been so beautiful, nor have they conveyed so many worlds.
