Every once in a while, a record comes along that doesn’t so much blur genre lines as it takes a sledgehammer to them, smashes them into dust, and then snorts the remains like a maniacal alchemist trying to reach enlightenment through distortion. Heka by Yinjinn is that record.
Yes, at its blackened core, this is a Black Metal album — dark, violent, pulsing with the cold heartbeat of the abyss — but to call it just that would be a fucking insult. Heka is a creature stitched together from the bones of a dozen genres, each one fused by fire and madness until it moves with an unnatural, staggering grace. It’s part Industrial without ever fully embracing machinery, part Death Metal without relying on brute force, and it drips with the narcotic sleaze of early Marilyn Manson while nursing the broken soul of Layne Staley in the background.
From the opening moments, there’s something off-kilter about Heka. Not in the “look how weird I am” sense — this isn’t pretension disguised as art — but in the genuinely unsettling sense, like the ground shifting beneath your feet. The riffs grind and twist like rusted gears, the bass thunders like a mechanical heartbeat, and the vocals are a shifting mass of personalities — from demonic roars to despairing croons, from whispered madness to screamed revelation.
The drumming holds everything together, a ritualistic pulse that hovers on the edge of chaos. It never quite descends into full blast-beat fury, but it’s close enough that you can feel the tension in every bar — the sense that this entire record might explode into shrapnel at any moment, only it never does. Yinjinn walks that fine, dangerous line between total control and utter collapse, and that’s where Heka draws its terrifying power.
What really gets under your skin, though, is the mood — that lingering, narcotic sense of dread and decay. It’s got the grime of Grunge, the sneer of Industrial, the despair of Black Metal, and somehow, it all feels coherent. There are moments where the guitars sound almost too human, as if they’re crying through the distortion, and then, in the next breath, they turn machine-like, hammering out cold, lifeless rhythm. It’s disorienting in the best possible way.
Across its six tracks, Heka doesn’t just explore darkness — it inhabits it. It crawls through the filth, finds beauty there, and drags it, kicking and screaming, into the light just to watch it burn.
By the time the record ends, you’re left staring into the void, unsure whether you’ve just experienced something transcendently brilliant or been possessed by it. Yinjinn doesn’t play music — he conjures. And Heka feels like a spell you shouldn’t have heard, but now can’t unhear.
Heka is available from the Yinjinn Bandcamp page.
CHOICE CUT: Transmogrified
BLACK METAL ARCHIVES VERDICT: Heka is a dark, genre-defying masterclass — part Black Metal, part Industrial nightmare, part grunge-soaked lament. It’s fucked up, it’s beautiful, it’s dangerous, and it’s absolutely essential.
