DRUDKH doesn’t play music in the conventional sense - they summon it. It rises from the dirt, from history, from something buried deep that refuses to be forgotten. Shadow Play is a passage, a weathered doorway leading into something vast, something bleak but alive.
From the first moments, the sound feels like mist rolling over abandoned fields - cold, heavy, inevitable. The guitars carve them into the air, one sharp, spiraling riff at a time. This isn’t technical wizardry for the sake of it. The tremolo-picked lines bleed into one another, layering like sediment, building and breaking apart in waves. There’s something primal here - black metal stripped down, but still grand in its own way.
The drumming isn’t about aggression for aggression’s sake. It shifts, pulls back, surges forward again, almost like it's breathing. The bass doesn’t just fill space; it moves like an undercurrent, thick and rumbling, keeping everything from floating off into the ether. And then the vocals - raw, distant, somewhere between a howl and a whisper. It’s less about the words themselves, more about the weight behind them, the emotion that drags through every syllable.
This album doesn’t offer easy moments. The quiet parts aren’t peaceful - they're tense, like the stillness before a storm. And when the storm comes, it doesn’t let up. Yet, for all its coldness, there’s something burning at the core. Not hope, exactly, but defiance. Shadow Play isn’t a requiem; it’s a reckoning. It grips you by the collar and makes you feel - loss, exile, the pull of things you can’t return to.
For those who live in the spaces between melancholy and fury - fans of Agalloch, Winterfylleth, Saor - this will feel like home. A lonely, windswept home, maybe. But home nonetheless. DRUDKH has never been about trends or expectations. They don’t make albums to please anyone but themselves. Shadow Play is proof of that, another chapter in a story that doesn’t ask to be told - it demands to be heard.