MEMBARIS To Release New Album Jan 21 2025

Forming in the dark, fateful days of 1999, MEMBARIS have long been a lingering force within Germany’s oft-overlooked black metal underground. From the band’s very first demo in 2002 onward, MEMBARIS have kept their feet firmly rooted in black metal’s foundational second wave, but always with an eye to expand upon that noble firmament. Reverence is key, as is passion, and the seamless, unselfconscious combination of both has become a hallmark of MEMBARIS.

In that cursed year of 2020, MEMBARIS emerged from the shadows after eight years with Misanthrosophie. Despite the darkness of the times, founding members Obscurus and Kraal unleashed a torrent of Technicolor black metal majesty – at the time, MEMBARIS’ strongest full-length work to date…until now, with Black Plasma Armour.

Tellingly titled, Black Plasma Armour is a fever-dreaming screed of kaleidoscopic aggression. MEMBARIS waste no time kicking into the album, with the title track leading off proceedings – surging, spiraling, askew – before dazzling shapes outside the mien of black metal begin to come into recognition. Always shifting, forever churning, breathlessly passionate, the six stout tracks comprising the 44-minute record go many, MANY places as themes and textures flow into and out of each other. Each one is as memorable as the last, often hanging upon a yearning / desperate hook or crest of beautiful annihilation; it’s almost as if each climax is not enough, that another is right over the brink. MEMBARIS’ execution – searingly tight and yet recognizably human – lifts these creations higher / deeper, penetrating body and soul with a power that’s blanching. As the slipstream of Black Plasma Armour continues, it’s almost alarmingly easy to lose sight that this is, in fact, a BLACK METAL record: no compromise, but no boundaries. And as the closer “Onwards to the Last Blink of Reason” races to its cathartic conclusion, it’s a fitting summation of the journey just experienced and the next to begin, ad infinitum.