Time is a weird beast. I grew up and still live in Iowa, United States. Seemingly often confused with Idaho, Iowa is also a state known for its agriculture. We grow lots of corn, soybeans, and hogs. There isn’t much more to most people, unless you are a metalhead. Metalheads and beyond are very aware of Slipknot, who are from Iowa and named their second album after the state. They also know that Slipknot are a collection of dudes in masks who make heavy-ish music. For me, they were inescapable in the early 2000s. They also inspired other acts to wear masks and face paint, which can add a certain appeal to performances and branding, but by the time these bands were big, I was already tired of the gimmick, something reserved for pop-metal acts to easily sell shirts at Spencer’s.
So, when I heard an album called Unsettling Whispers back in 2018, the last thing on my mind was ‘is this band wearing masks?‘ The first thing on my mind was how awesome the black metal was. I could easily see corpse paint, but when I found out that Gaerea wear identity-hiding masks, I was trvely surprised. My prejudice against masked bands would have probably left me writing off Gaerea instead of immediately falling in love with them.
The Portuguese anonymous quintet has released two albums since Unsettling Whisper, and I hungrily devoured each one upon release. 2020’s Limbo was one of my favorite albums that year, and I grew to really appreciate Gaerea‘s brand of cathartic, melodic black metal. It retained all of the musical edge of black metal, while mostly eschewing the trappings of pagan/Satanic/occult themes instead favoring a songwriting approach based in human experience. These albums all made a splash amongst fans and critics, and with a steadily growing popularity, Gaerea unleash their latest album, Coma, as a band leveling up.
Coma takes everything Gaerea have done to this point and puts it under the knife. They have surgically removed anything extraneous and set themselves up to emerge from the underground into bigger arenas and also added some more accessible pieces to their songwriting. Notably, no songs on Coma are over eight minutes long, which is a departure from their longer tracks on previous albums. They have also added some clean singing, some radio-friendly drum fills, and some guitar tones that are closer to post-rock than black metal. The melodies are catchier, but the ferocity isn’t tempered.
Album opener “The Poet’s Ballet” starts with reverb-heavy guitar strums and synths as layered clean vocals come in. This almost sounds like Dredg or some kind of indie-pop. I was taken aback, at first, like could this be the same band? Yet, as the track approaches three minutes, the heavy kicks in and all doubt left my mind. The track careens forward, using the pretty clean intro as a launchpad into an increasingly gorgeous (in a black metal kind of way) song. ‘So let us gather, in this morbid light/embrace the bleakness, as day turns to night/as we ascend, sanity is the cost,’ the song concludes, a vicious juxtaposition to the beginning.
This kind of catharsis is what Gaerea have been doing their whole career. While contemporaries tend to favor shoegaze and prettier moments, Gaerea have always hung close to a more raw black metal sound, but now, they are embracing some of their softer side to get to the payoff instead of prolonged guitar work. They sound incredibly tight, firing on all cylinders on tracks like “Suspended” and the suffocating “Coma” where there is no need to question how heavy this band can get. Though the cleaner parts may veer into alt-rock territory, they are short-lived and serve to heighten the punishing black metal they have always put first.
Yet these added dynamics, on tracks like “Wilted Flower” and “Unknown” pack an emotional punch and show that even in their more melodic and hooky tendencies, Gaerea are still delivering some of the very finest black metal that could grace a headlining festival stage. Coma‘s sleek production and tighter tracks could easily elevate Gaerea to new heights of popularity. Metal fans who don’t explicitly like black metal would find plenty to enjoy here. These tracks breathe new life into an already praise-worthy band, setting the literal and figurative stage for Gaerea to be the next big metal band.
When I hear bands do this, make a marked attempt to appeal to a broader audience, my natural reaction is to roll my eyes. Gaerea even had the requisite four albums before moving in this direction, but unlike Metallica, Mastodon, Black Sabbath, and many others, Gaerea‘s jump into this territory seems more genuine and more artful. Like the cover art for Coma, the rolling eye shedding tears manifests itself as something far more gorgeous to experience than to read the description of it. The only question left is whether or not the masks retain their anonymity with all of the attention they will get after Coma.