WULKANAZ
LUFTUZ

For over 15 years now, selfsame mainman Wulkanaz - mastermind Wagner Ödegård (aka Komulonimbus), a man of many creative guises, including labelmates DUGHPA and MAUVET MAUVE - has pursued a singular, idiosyncratic vision of black metal across myriad demos, EPs, and splits. WULKANAZ's four albums to date, however, have been become cult classics among the diehards brave enough to behold the mainman's visions, and those visions have hit interstellar overdrive with the band's long-awaited fifth album, Luftuz.

Raw on the surface but psychedelically layered, Luftuz immediately sounds like WULKANAZ – and yet, it orbits its own strange galaxy altogether. Joining Ödegård is session drummer Calle Larsson, who played on OFERMOD's Mysterium Iniquitatis among others, and together do they passionately play a malevolently swirling, frequently bewildering plunge into the depths of madness - deeper than ever, in fact. Sounds seemingly explode from every direction, and what may sound like normal riffs or rhythms soon get tweaked into rude shapes, with hazy fuzz hovering over nearly everything, only to often get stripped back into startlingly skeletal quietude. Of course, black metal undoubtedly forms the base, but WULKANAZ characteristically exude an acute punkishness in execution, with the previously folkish melodicism taking a more ominous (and stomping) approach more often than not.

Previous WULKANAZ songs reveled in the barest-of-bones minimalism, delivered in rapid-fire succession. By comparison, Luftuz is almost the sound of the duo going "maximal," with all but two of the ten tracks here reaching beyond three minutes and one even over five: quite the sea change, given that songs rarely hit three minutes before! Likewise, the vintage synths that Ödegård employs in the aforementioned projects take a prominent role on Luftuz, malformed into something sorta resembling guitar - or, again, something strange and cosmic that's fever-dreaming to behold - and everything consequently sounds BIG and expansive, just like space itself. But even beyond the sounds WULKANAZ utilize here, Luftuz shows that the band are astute songwriters...just ones operating on a wild wavelength all their own, now more than ever.

The self-titled album from 2018 encapsulated the WULKANAZ aesthetic that had existed from the beginning, bringing it to a fever pitch. Far from abandoning that unapologetic idiosyncrasy, the band have managed to boldly build upon it and expand their alien language, both leaving the past behind and embarking upon frontiers both verdant and virulent: this is Luftuz!