Style: Post-black metal, deathcore, progressive metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Alcest, Astronoid, Cattle Decapitation
Country: Australia
Release date: 04 April 2025
I sometimes wonder what life would be like if I were born in the pre-Internet age. Well, technically I was, but my teenage years coincided with the proliferation of broadband connections into practically every home in the developed world, including mine. Combined with my burgeoning love of metal music, high-speed Internet opened up doors of musical exploration which a non-online version of myself couldn’t have accessed. I remember when (the now entirely defunct) MP3.com was a legal music sharing and discovery site, the day Napster came online, and the first YouTube video—all before I turned twenty. These tools, combined with browsing forums and record label websites, exposed me to various metal subgenres. Today, I use the likes of Bandcamp and Spotify, but the spirit of exploration remains.
Which brings me to Illyria—a band recommended to me by a forum user (shoutout to Keyser) several years ago that has found a consistent place in my rotation ever since. Would offline me ever have discovered a small, progressive post-black metal act from Australia? Probably not. The Subway itself has yet to find space to cover them, and obscure prog acts are our bread and butter.
Considering that fact, a brief overview of their discography is in order: though rooted in a post-black metal sound that they carved out on their 2016 self-titled debut, each subsequent Illyria release finds new ways to break from that mold. The Carpathian Summit (2019) reaches into progressive rock and metal territory, weaving in intricate compositions and varying styles to complement the emotive black metal core. By contrast, Take Me Somewhere Beautiful (2022) dials back the post-black intensity, making space for raw punk energy and screamo-anthem catharsis. Then there is last year’s Wanderlust, a relentless yet melodic storm where searing extreme metal collides with shoegazey introspection. Illyria are always stretching, but never remove their footing entirely from their post-black base.
With The Walk of Atonement, their latest release and first EP, Illyria doesn’t stray too far from its predecessor sonically. And why should they? For my money, Wanderlust is their crowning achievement, and we’re not even a year removed from its release. This extended player feels like, well, an extension of Wanderlust—retaining the heavy death metal bits, a dose of stank-face groove, and the lost-in-thought soft moments, albeit enlarged to a single twenty-three-minute composition. Yet, it is also different. An unsettling eeriness permeates the soundscape throughout. Atonement is taking us back to the Dark Ages, and not just the pre-Internet kind: we’re going medieval, man.
Frontman Ilija Stajić says that this release “is an homage to an experience I had in a fictional world that I was totally immersed in. It is evident throughout our discography that I enjoy writing about video games that I play. The Crusader Kings and Mount & Blade series with its truly amazing modding community had me entranced when composing this EP.” The lyrics, title, and album art certainly evoke the time period and geographic setting of those games: public trial, judgement and punishment, revenge and personal justice—all wrapped in religious undertones.
Like the strict and unforgiving traditions of medieval societies, prog fans have fairly exacting and sometimes contradictory standards. We like recurring themes, but not repetition; the vice of adhering to genre hallmarks tempered by the virtue of musical originality; variety and variance, but also cohesion and congruence. The Walk of Atonement understands this delicate balancing act, and through a plethora of melodic and stylistic choices largely avoids wavering on the high wire. A walking, trudging melodic motif appears throughout the EP in different contexts that ties its handful of sections and moments, and thus the release as a whole, together. The vocals utilize an array of styles—black metal rasps, death metal gutturals, that weird cool scrungy thing that Cattle Decapitation’s Travis Ryan does, as well as cleans that range from melodious whispers to bombastic refrains. Similarly diverse, the guitars would find a home in the aforementioned extreme metal genres in various moments, while the drums fill in with some blast beat bliss and double bass intensity where appropriate. In the background, moody strings, synths, and intricate piano accompaniment provide a hefty amount of color and atmosphere to the aural landscape. Atonement is mostly a metal EP, for sure, but it efficiently and effectively caters to my prog fancies (re: variety) in its tight timeframe.
At the outset of this piece, the lyrics ask the gathered mass to cast stones in judgment. I’m happy to oblige in this regard, but looking at the scattered options on the ground, I’m not really finding any rocks big enough to cause any serious damage. There are a few pointy pebbles, though. I lift one and heave it. The transition into the bridge is way too abrupt and stilted. Another. And that bridge itself lingers too long on a slow and repetitive melody. One last tiny, but smooth stone for good measure. I don’t know how effective the angsty vocal timbre in the intro is. I’ll let other hecklers in the crowd try to bloody up our martyr, as these criticisms are all that I have in me.
Predicting Illyria’s next move has never been easy—each release reshapes expectations set by its predecessor. So, even though a lot of the Wanderlust influences are here, The Walk of Atonement is a neat little aside in their work that could be only that—or it could be a show of strength for lengthier, proggier things to come. I’ll be listening either way.
Recommended tracks: It’s one composition, so listen to the whole thing!
You may also like: Serein, Subterranean Lava Dragon, Together to the Stars
Final verdict: 7.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Self release
Illyria is:
– Ilija Stajić (vocals, guitar)
– Andre Avila (rhythm guitar)
– Harry Prosser (lead guitar)
– Jeffrey Anderson (bass)
– Cam Stone-Griffin (percussion)
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