Beats and yelling: Petrale

Goat at Sunset
Out 1^st February, self-released

Croatia’s Petrale add to their significant run of releases with another subtle shift in direction. Where 2024’s ‘The World Down There’ was technically dense but experientially a stripped back, nocturnal journey of dissonant surrealism, ‘Goat at Sunset’ wrests this project in a more playful and melodically typical direction. Typical, that is, by the standards of this project. The album remains an uncanny experience of eerie formative black metal riffing. It draws on the haunting spirit of a non-Norwegian genus in Master’s Hammer, Beherit, and Profanatica, but expands this vision out through light touches of jazz, contemporary dissonant black metal, and plenty of atypical rhythmic shapes (for black metal) derived from post punk and adjacent styles.

Every Petrale album – to my knowledge – is orchestrated in the same way, by the same individual, using the same reel to reel analogue recording technique. This creates a striking aesthetic continuity across their now chunky discography. The production is warm yet raw, close yet polished. The mix of colder high end guitars more typical of Nordic black metal contrasts nicely with a lower end rhythm section more evocative of Southern European styles. The former elements remain twisted out of shape, eschewing euphoric naturalism in favour of lyrical yet violent jagged interjections, delivered as one would an expletive to disrupt the narrative flow. Drums are equally warm and organic, offering a rich yet intimate foundation. Their stylistic reach is broad, oscillating between robust blast-beats, gentle back-beats, and four on the floor driving tempos, the danceability of which violently juxtaposes with the jazzier or more angular passages. Vocals are kept at a mid-range, ghoulish bark of distorted energy, patiently narrating their way through the labyrinthine riff driven passages with assertive confidence.

Petrale offer a black metal counterpart to that form of modernist death metal that was popular just over a decade ago in the likes of Morbus Chron or Execration. But these acts, despite deserving accolades for at least attempting to develop rather than regress the genre at the crest of the OSDM wave, often resulted in statements too clinical and coldly intellectual to leave a lasting aesthetic impression. Petrale, whether by accident or design, take a similar approach of injecting modernist, abstract forms lifted from jazz and avant-garde alt rock into the very DNA of otherwise stubbornly traditional metallic forms, and in so doing craft a liminal, unique experience, the holistic summation of which is hard to grasp. Like a dream slipping away in the first minutes of consciousness. Typical black metal chord sequences engage in a constant battle with their dissonant counterparts. Punky punches of staccato regressions pull these elements apart with rhythmic confidence, surprise salvos of jazz breakdowns and driving dance beats crop up incrementally, seemingly with the express intention of disrupting the overall flow of the album. If anything this essence is easier to grasp on ‘Goat at Sunset’ than previous efforts for the simple reason that the black metal elements are more assertive here, taking a more dominant role in determining the direction of these pieces. Ironically, despite remaining defiantly eclectic, it’s the fact that Petrale have leant into their extreme metal heritage that they have ended up crafting a more accessible album, whilst sacrificing nothing of their expansive vision or unique character that permeates their entire body of work.