Unverkalt break from the past with newly blackened edge on ‘Introjects’

Ever since they emerged from Greece’s underground catacombs, UNVERKALT have been drawn to the edge. On their upcoming third album, the post-metal luminaries finally plunge into the darkness that’s always waited for them below. While wrestling with the weight of our accursed history, Héréditaire now stands as the band’s heaviest and most heartfelt offering.

Now, Unverkalt released the third and final advanced single from Héréditaire. “Introjects” breaks from the broken beliefs of the past with the band’s newly blackened edge.

“We often carry beliefs and ideas that were never ours but absorbed from the worlds of others”, Unverkalt says. “These dead constructs linger just beneath the surface, quietly shaping us – until something breaks. There’s a moment of dissonance, a crack in the surface, a realization that the weight we carry isn’t ours to bear”.

Unverkalt are still possessed by a cinematic vision. Like the spell that falls over a darkened theater, “Introjects” descends into a doomy trance beneath hypnotic bass tolls. “It’s all sorts of dead ideas / They cling to us all the same”, chimes Dimitra Kalavrezou. Her spellbinding cleans are still one of the band’s defining traits, but the song’s piercing tremolo-picked melodies reveal their newly blackened edge.

“We love to experiment with every album”, Unverkalt’s guitarist and primary composer Themis Ioanno says. “My two favorite genres are black and post-metal. With Héréditaire, we wanted to blend the two together. The heavier direction hits harder on the heart”.

Héréditaire marks a pulse-pounding new direction for Unverkalt, but their upcoming third album traces back to our deepest and darkest origins. With each headbanging chorus, “Introjects” breaks further from widely held beliefs that were never ours but inherited like a disease passed down between generations. “We just want our own way / Cut off from the source”, Kalavrezou warns before all hell breaks lose. As if summoned from the fiery blast beats, her newly blackened screams bring the old pillars of society crumbling to the ground.

“This song is a violent detachment from borrowed identities”, Kalavrezou says. “In that rupture, awakens the faint possibility of becoming something real”.

“I enjoy discovering new, unique and compelling music in today’s overwhelming world of information, and I believe I truly succeeded with Unverkalt”, says Season of Mist labelmate and Rotting Christ frontman Sakis Tolis, who’s featured on the monolithic “I, The Deceit” from Héréditaire. “This is an exceptional piece of art, worth every minute of listening”.

The video for “Introjects” was produced by Unverkalt and directed by Themis Ioannou at RAWBITE Studio.

UNVERKALT are drawn to the edge. Since emerging from the underground, the Germany by way of Greece post-metal band have balanced boundless atmosphere with suffocating heaviness. Their third album and first since signing with Season of Mist doesn’t continue in that direction so much as it plunges into the darkness that’s always been waiting below. Héréditaire lifts the veil from our cursed existence. What emerges is Unverkalt’s heaviest and most heartfelt offering.

“Our aim has always been to blend softer, more romantic elements with extreme chaos. With Héréditaire that time has now come”, says the band’s guitarist and chief composer Themis Ioannou. “This album is a lament for what is far older than our very existence. It speaks of what seeps through generations, searching for an answer to one pervasive question: What do we carry that was never ours?”

From the beginning, Unverkalt was born from an urge to give life to grief. In 2017, Ioannou started the band with vocalist Dimitra Kalavrezou in hopes of creating something that was slow-burning and visceral, crushing yet delicate. Their debut made good on that promise: “…so rivetingly beautiful that you will have to deepen to digest it”, Metal Hammer Greece wrote in awe of L’Origine du Monde. “Easily on the top-10 of 2020”.

The band’s second album followed three years later to further acclaim. While swooning between obsession and annihilation, A Lump of Death: A Chaos of Dead Lovers sharpened Unverkalt’s vision by pushing their avant-garde streak with more force. “Beyond being able to point roughly towards a couple of different genres, it is utterly impossible to compare them to any other artist out there making music in the same vein”,  The Sleeping Shaman admired. Echoes and Dust agreed: “It stands in its own right as a beautiful slice of filmic post-rock, a soundtrack without a movie beyond the one playing in your head”.

Héréditaire is still possessed by cinematic visions. Like a camera coming into focus, lead single “Die Auslöschung” appears through a thickening haze before it’s snapped out of a trance by drummer Christian Eggers’ fiery blast beats. The album shifts between colors, textures, even languages. Stirred by a mournful saw of strings, “Ænae Lithi” raises memories of the Great Fire of Smyrna that were handed down by Themis’ grandmother. But where previous albums took cues from French painting and European film noir, this one throws back the velvet curtain in favor a veil. “Oath Ov Prometheus” dismantles the myth of man as god’s perfect creation with Kalavrezou’s freshly blackened vocals.

“We love to experiment with every album”, Ioannou says. “With Héréditaire, we wanted to introduce extreme vocals because they bring out all these heavy feelings. It’s like they’re shaking you awake”.

While Héréditaire is a pulse-pounding new direction for Unverkalt, the album’s arc traces back to our deepest and darkest origins. Amidst the tremolo-picked wreckage of “Penumbrian Lament”, long-held beliefs are swallowed into the void of guitarist Eli Mavrychev’s death growls. “It’s all sorts of dead ideas / They cling to us all the same”, Kalavrezou whispers, only to break into screams on “Introjects” beneath Joscha Hoyer’s throbbing bass line. “The concept behind the record is tied in with the album’s overall heaviness”, she says. “Each song peels back another blackened layer of memory, trauma and suffering, which linger over us like ghosts: invisible, yet endlessly present”.

Kalavrezou’s mystifying cleans remain one of Unverkalt’s defining traits. Even when trembling beneath the monolithic riff of “I, The Deceit”, her contempt for those who stand by as the world burns is heated when forged alongside her Athenian brother-in-arms Sakis Tolis from Rotting Christ. But as the album draws to a close, Héréditaire ends shadowed in doubt for the future. “Bathed in lies / Can we make it better” she wonders before disappearing into the shivering wake left by “Maladie de ‘Esprit”.

“This album is not meant to resolve”, the band says, “but to dissolve patterns from those who came before, faceless yet familiar. The colors have drained. What remains is veiled in black, not as a symbol, but as a truth that covers everything”.

On Héréditaire, Unverkalt lift the veil on our cursed existence with their heaviest and most heartfelt offering.

Recording Lineup:
Dimitra Kalavrezou — Vocals
Themis Ioannou — Guitars, Keys
Eli Mavrychev — Guitars, Vocals
Joscha Hoyer — Bass
Christian Eggers — Drums