Hegemone - Voyance

On "Voyance," Hegemone Take Blackened Post-Metal Beyond the Senses (Early Album Stream)


It’s tough to boil down Hegemone‘s upcoming album Voyance down to small, finite sentences—conceptually and musically, it’s simply immense. The Polish band uses an impressively vast language of blackened post-metal and sludge to battle enormous ideas on their third album, wallowing in puddles of ambient misery and struggling through full-on black metal storms. Voyance expresses sadness, certainly, but the grief-stricken tonality has a thoughtful side, too. Keep your mind open as you listen, and perhaps there’s lessons to learn amongst the despair.

One such lesson: the band’s mastery of album flow and transitions. One personal highlight of the record is the beginning of “Inference”: the heartbreaking prior track “Abeyance” ends with crackling noise, which gains outdoor ambience as “Inference” begins, connecting the two seamlessly. A musing clean melody starts to build on this new track, but it’s cut off, violently, by vocals burbling with caustic rage, refusing to be withheld any longer. Guitars provoke and seethe while synthesizers soothe, set to intense percussion that remains hypnotizingly intricate throughout the track.

Voyance is a constant wellspring of new sounds and textures, sometimes coming across as brief flashes of delight and hope amongst the somber proceedings, but at other points serving as ominous hints at new lows to come. Listening to it comes with a feeling of discovery, of finding something new, and the oddity of that within an album generally architected as a “wall of sadness” only sharpens this sensation.

The band comments:

“Voyance” is for us a step into the desert. Our interpretation of religiosity and questions about the meaning of our faiths. When creating sounds of desperation, we were looking for new sounds as well as trying to include in the songs what we like best – a wall of sadness. We invite you to share moments of despair with us.

Voyance releases September 15th via Brucia Records.