Raw.
Not “raw” like a buzzword slapped on a Bandcamp tag. Not “raw” like a lo-fi aesthetic made to sound cool. I’m talking raw as in primal, feral, blood-soaked Black Metal — the kind that sounds like it was recorded in a snowstorm on a cursed four-track and then exorcised through a torn speaker cone. Anathema by Keys To The Astral Gates And Mystic Doors is exactly that. It’s eleven minutes of chaos, frostbite, and spiritual rot — and it’s fucking amazing.
From the moment Royal Anathema tears into being, you know exactly what kind of blasphemy you’ve signed up for. The guitars don’t just buzz — they snarl, hiss, and claw at your eardrums like a starving beast. The drums rumble beneath everything like distant artillery, and the vocals sound less like a human performance and more like a Nordic gale howling through a frozen chapel where the walls themselves have started screaming.
There’s no polish, no gloss, no mercy.
Production quality? That motherfucker got thrown out a window before the first riff was even tracked. Every instrument bleeds into the next, creating a wall of grimy, abrasive filth that somehow manages to sound perfect for what it’s trying to do. It’s not meant to sound pretty. It’s meant to sound like the collapse of sanity, the moment when blood and frost mix in the snow and you realise there’s no way back.
And yet, for all that chaos, there’s structure here. There’s intent. Keys To The Astral Gates And Mystic Doors aren’t just bashing out noise — they’re sculpting it into something hypnotic and ugly in the best possible way. There’s a rhythm buried in the mess, a heartbeat under all that distortion, and if you listen long enough, it starts to make a twisted kind of sense.
Track two — the short interlude — gives a fleeting moment of atmospheric reprieve. A minute and forty seconds of breathing space before Accursed Hellhounds Loosed Upon Shiv’ring Prey drags you back into the storm with fangs bared and eyes burning. The riffs thrash and writhe, the vocals sound like the throat of some ancient god being torn open, and the whole thing feels like it’s seconds away from disintegrating completely. But it doesn’t. It holds, and in doing so, it becomes almost transcendental in its brutality.
This is the kind of record that reminds you why Raw Black Metal exists — not as nostalgia, not as aesthetic, but as pure catharsis. It’s music that drags you out into the cold, holds your face against the ice, and whispers: “You asked for this.”
Anathema by Keys To The Astral Gates And Mystic Doors is available from the Empty Pit Recordings Bandcamp page.
CHOICE CUT: Accursed Hellhounds Loosed Upon Shiv’ring Prey
BLACK METAL ARCHIVES VERDICT: A short, vicious, frostbitten attack that sounds like the aftermath of a ritual gone horribly right. Anathema is filthy, primal, and perfect in its imperfection.
