"Violent shreds and distant screams come at you like a black winter blizzard, harsh and grotesquely exciting. The music breaks into a doom-laden passage with more furious riffs and more of those guttural growls, soaked in a mid-tempo fog. A blistering introduction to the album and a sign of things to come"
Bleak, depressive and with a darkness that terrorises and torments, Foraoisí gan Iniúchadh, which translates to “Unexplored forests” is the creation of Tomás Hynes. Torrential post-black walls of noise with relentless blast-beaten percussions give this young musician from Co. Wexford a veil of gloom that will smother and drag you on a harrowing journey through the corridors of obscurity.
With a talent way ahead of his years, Tomás has crafted a stellar slab of atmospheric black metal that is as good as anything you will hear anywhere across the globe. I have spent the last few years falling helplessly into this genre of music, witnessing some of the bleakest and most harrowing solo projects around, and I have to say that Isolation sits very comfortably amidst all that mayhem. Vicious, melodic and all-consuming, this brand of depressive black metal can bring with it a unique and almost uplifting presence. This style of music resonates with my darker side; therefore Isolation is simply sublime.
Foraoisí gan Iniúchadh wastes no time in creating drama and suspense with the opening track Everything Turns To Black. Haunting breaths and screams, along with sinister synths and a barrage of blast beats tear the world asunder right from the off. Violent shreds and distant screams come at you like a black winter blizzard, harsh and grotesquely exciting. The music breaks into a doom-laden passage with more furious riffs and more of those guttural growls, soaked in a mid-tempo fog. A blistering introduction to the album and a sign of things to come.
See The Sun Rise, with its depressively black pace and its banshee howls bring another dimension to Tomas’s sound, all more measured but nonetheless chilling. Pink Mist follows this formula with that DSBM iciness, and its powerful crescendos of unrelenting pace and intensity.
Tracks like The Awakening are more akin to straight up black-metal, with its high tempo, fuzzy guitars and vocals. There are even some slow sombre riffs that you’d remember from the great old school death-metal bands thrown in for good measure along with some Gregorian chants to completely fuck with your head!
The Kingdom Will Die and The Souls Of The Damned bring with them a more forlorn and heart-breaking sound, with screams of desperation all tangled up in a barbed-wired ball of deeply melodic hooks and licks. These two tracks remind me of bands like Dodsrit and maybe even White Ward or Olhava. Its sullen atmospherics is its greatest gift.
Epilogue closes the album with a horror infused passage, glorifying all that’s great and melancholic in atmospheric black metal, wallowing in a sea of blackened synths that are good enough to grace any horror films closing scene. Tomás and his brainchild Foraoisí gan Iniúchadh is a must have for any of you who adorn all things dark and mystic. Isolation is the perfect soundtrack to the cold dark evenings that are gradually closing in and swallowing us up without mercy. A super release.