Burning Embers, Forgotten Wolves by Autrest is an anomaly in the world of Atmospheric Black Metal as it is, genuinely, a Black Metal album that is atomspheric.
What I mean by that is quite simply that a lot of bands within this genre focus more on the Black Metal than they do on creating a mood or a feeling with their music, so you get the flat out assault of a Black Metal album with the occasional sound of wind blowing through the trees being thrown into the mix, almost as an afterthought, but Autrest doesn’t do that.
Autrest focuses on building each song so they stand as a mini-epic, songs that take you to a place where you can smell the cold in the air, feel nature run her fingers down your spine, and hear the strangled howls of fallen souls, long since left this plane, yet still trapped here.
This is not an easy thing to achieve and should stand as a blueprint for those other bands and acts more intent on playing as fast as they can while a bird farts in the background to signify they are one with the Earth, just how to do it and do it properly.
Matheus Vidor, the man behind the mask of Autrest, does everything, writing, performing, producing, just being a general musical badass, but for me, his finest quality is understanding what a song is and what it needs.
Nothing on Burning Embers, Forgotten Wolves every outstays it welcome, with each track perfectly timed to bleed the ultimate amount of emotion from the listener.
He seamlessly weaves rhythms that pound like the heart of a storm with guitars that sound like molten rock tearing through stone, while vocals howls from the belly of some ancient leviathan, and it is glorious. Both uplifting and terrifying at the same time, this is the base on which he builds Burning Embers, Forgotten Wolves, and if that’s all it did, it would be a pretty good Black Metal album, but Autrest isn’t just a pretty good Black Metal one-man band. It’s a fucking great Black Metal one-man band.
The way he can move from face shredding Black Metal into musical passages that are suffocating, sacred shrouds of biblical sound that wrap themselves around you until there’s nothing left but the music or that are so hauntingly heart-wrenching – such as the intro to album closer Chasm of Time where I swear to God I could close my eyes and see the whole fucking cosmos just stretching out before me – is on another level.
Burning Embers, Forgotten Wolves is more than just an album — it’s a journey carved in frost and fire, a map of emotions charted in tremolo riffs and abyssal roars. Autrest has crafted something that feels ancient yet urgent, like some long-buried hymn being dragged from the soil and screamed back into the heavens. It’s proof that Atmospheric Black Metal can still surprise, still devastate, still make you feel something primal deep in your marrow. If there’s any justice in this cold, uncaring universe, this record won’t be forgotten — it’ll burn forever, a lonely, furious flame against the dark.
Burning Embers, Forgotten Wolves by Autrest is out September 5, 2025 via Northern Silence Productions.
CHOICE CUT: Chasm of Time
RATING: 4 OUT OF 5
RATING SYSTEM:
- 0: Fucking Shit
- 1: Shit
- 2: Not Bad Shit
- 3: Pretty Good Shit
- 4: Amazing Fucking Shit
- 5: The Best Shit You Will Ever Hear
PRESS SOURCE: Cátia C./Against PR.
