Trying to categorise St. Unholyness’ debut is a fool’s errand, and frankly, anyone who approaches this record with neat little genre boxes lined up and ready deserves the confusion they’re about to experience. This album refuses comfort. It refuses clarity. It refuses to sit still long enough to be labelled, tagged, or filed away neatly on some digital shelf. Instead, it sprawls, mutates, and shifts shape right in front of you, daring you to keep up.
Yes, it is Heavy Metal.
Yes, it is Doom Metal.
Yes, there are Stoner Rock grooves, Black Metal shadows, and echoes of Sabbath’s low-end gravity.
But it’s also none of those things in isolation.
What St. Unholyness have done here is take the essence of those genres — the weight, the swagger, the darkness, the trance, the menace — and fuse them into something that feels both deeply familiar and completely alien. It’s like recognising a face in a dream: you know it, but you can’t quite place it, and that unsettled feeling is exactly where this record thrives.
A lot of that comes down to the sheer audacity of the songwriting. This album doesn’t move in straight lines. It lurches, coils, expands, and contracts. Riffs don’t simply repeat; they evolve, fracture, reassemble. Grooves settle in just long enough for you to get comfortable before the floor shifts beneath your feet. There’s a constant sense that the music is thinking for itself, pulling the listener along whether they’re ready or not.
The rhythm section plays a huge part in this. The drum programming — which could so easily have sounded cold or mechanical — is instead used as a tool of precision. It hits exactly where it needs to, locking into the bass with a pulse that feels hypnotic rather than rigid. The bass itself is a driving force throughout the album, thick and authoritative, grounding the more exploratory moments so the whole thing never spirals into self-indulgence.
But let’s not dance around the obvious centrepiece here: Christina Earlymorn.
Her performance on this album is nothing short of staggering. Guitar and vocals alike are handled with a level of confidence and control that borders on unreal. As a guitarist, she displays an instinctive understanding of when to restrain and when to unleash. The riffs range from crushing, low-slung doom to sharp, incisive attacks, and when she steps into more expressive territory, it never feels like showing off — it feels necessary, inevitable.
And those vocals.
They don’t just sit on top of the music; they inhabit it. Earlymorn moves through registers and textures with ease, bending melody and aggression to her will. At times her voice soars with an almost classic metal clarity, at others it drags itself through grit, menace, and something far darker. There’s a sense that she’s not bound by conventional vocal ranges or expectations — she simply goes where the song demands, and the songs demand a lot.
It’s no exaggeration to say that moments on this album genuinely stopped me in my tracks. Not because they were loud or shocking, but because they carried that rare spark of discovery — the feeling that you’re hearing someone do something new, something bold, something that rewires your understanding of what’s possible within heavy music. I haven’t felt that kind of jaw-on-the-floor astonishment since the first time I heard Eruption tear through my speakers as a wide-eyed kid, realising that the guitar could be something more than I ever imagined.
What makes Through High Holy Haze truly special, though, is that despite its ambition and virtuosity, it never loses its soul. This isn’t technical for the sake of it. It isn’t clever-clever experimentation. There’s a raw, almost primal core beating at the heart of this album, a sense that every twist and turn is driven by instinct rather than ego.
By the time the record draws to a close, you’re left with that rare feeling of having witnessed something significant. Not just a strong debut, but the arrival of a voice — singular, fearless, and utterly unbothered by expectation.
Through High Holy Haze doesn’t ask to be understood.
It asks to be experienced.
And once you’ve experienced it, good luck forgetting it.
Through High Holy Haze by St. Unholyness will be available on December 25th.
CHOICE CUT: Alchemist Blues
BLACK METAL ARCHIVES VERDICT: A fearless, genre-defying debut that sounds like pure creative ignition. St. Unholyness is the work of an artist operating without limits, where virtuosity serves vision and every note feels vital. Daring, electrifying, and impossible to ignore — this is the sound of something truly special being born.
