Doomjazz/avant-garde black metal project THE LOVECRAFT SEXTET release a spellbinding collision of genres on Penance.
Release date: October 16, 2026 | Debemur Mori Productions | Bandcamp
I have a soft spot for records I cannot easily classify into distinct genres. The struggle to explain a band’s sound clearly is, strangely enough, fun for me, encouraging me to come up with concise descriptors that aren’t solely based on comparisons to other bands. It’s a fun and productive exercise, and the music is almost always awesome anyway.
That brings me to THE LOVECRAFT SEXTET, the side-side project of doomjazz purveyor Jason Köhnen, whose previous work includes several million things like Bong-Ra, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, and Celestial Season. THE LOVECRAFT SEXTET‘s most recent album Penance is an excellent showcase of the marriage of dark, ambient jazz, classical opera, and avant-garde black metal, a mishmash of sonic ideas that blend perfectly together despite their scattered roots.
We open with the sole single “Si Quaeris”, a slingshot into the world of Penance, one of profoundly gothic atmosphere. Like many doomjazz/darkjazz songs, “Si Quaeris” shambles along at a slow tempo, giving the individual instruments of the ensemble time to float in and out and interact with each other. Köhnen, who provides all the components of the music with the exception of the soprano singer and the saxophonist, pulls no punches with the opening note, a thunky percussion hit on top of moody synth pads that feels a bit like a lost Angelo Badalamenti track. Köhnen’s animalistic growls and groans play off the harmonized saxophones in a way that is simply entrancing, making four minutes feel like fourteen in the best way possible.
The cover art for the album is a good indicator of what you’re in for for the rest of the ride, speaking of the general atmosphere. From THE LOVECRAFT SEXTET‘s Bandcamp description:
‘Penance is inspired by the 1675 Jan Baen painting of the same name that currently hangs in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. In 1672, the De Witt brothers were beaten, mutilated, and hanged before a crowd for alleged treason. It is said that the observers themselves committed acts of cannibalism with the brothers’ severed body parts. The event and subsequent painting are a reflection of incredible human barbarism that has always profoundly affected Köhnen.‘
Oh! Okay. You know what, it makes sense; there’s both gorgeous beauty and palpable evil on Penance, and the experience of listening to it is akin to admiring the painting in question. A little reverence, a little terror. Very cool stuff.
“Anima Christi” is one of the strongest entries on Penance, a 12-minute swirling mass of off-kilter percussion, wailing saxophone (by Colin Webster), and demonic growls buried low in the mix, evoking a sense of dread. Soprano Lilian Tong’s vocals are particularly effective on this track, truly otherworldly and downright religious at times, showing the album’s more traditional sources of inspiration.
While “Requiem Aeternam” may be the record’s most straightforwardly jazz track, “Confiteor” course-corrects quickly, with Köhnen’s heavily distorted spoken lines feeling like he’s summoning an entity from Hell atop noisy, atonal backing brass droning. This contrast is key to THE LOVECRAFT SEXTET‘s sound: equal parts black metal-inflected aggression and neoclassical gesturing.
The setpiece of the B-side is the closer “Te Deum”, another over-10-minute song that lets Köhnen and company stretch their legs with a longer, meandering composition. The latter half of the track feels almost optimistic at times, a good change of pace for a wildly brooding album. There’s moments of wonder on “Te Deum” that are hard to accurately describe, but I’ll say that this track is best suited for laying on a blanket outside on a chilly autumn night with a substance of your choice.
Penance is strange, mesmerizing, intricate, and, somehow, extremely listenable. I found myself very focused on it while listening, and came back to it frequently, more so than I do for other review material. If you’re unfamiliar with any of the aforementioned genre buckets THE LOVECRAFT SEXTET pull from, I’d say give the record a shot anyway. Sometimes it’s nice to just experience something fucking weird.
