Style: Atmospheric black metal, blackgaze (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Deafheaven, Alcest, Harakiri for the Sky
Country: Russia
Release date: 27 February 2026

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I am not the meditative type. A therapist once suggested I try it. I did. It wasn’t for me. Work, family, hobbies, and the general low-grade chaos of life don’t leave much space for sitting still with my thoughts. Even if they did, I found that sitting still with my thoughts is the last thing I want to do. Meditation, as a practice, requires stillness. I tend to start looking for the next task the moment I finish the current one.

But I have a record player. And I bought Memorial.

If music can be meditation—and I need it to be—then Olhava’s seventh full-length is another in my pantheon of musical meditations that bring me close to the stillness that therapist had me seek. Not because it’s quiet, though it has its quiet moments. Not because it demands nothing of you, because it demands quite a lot. But because somewhere in its seventy-eight minutes, the restless part of my brain that is always reaching for the next adrenaline rush, the next thing to read, or the next shift in a song, actually goes still. The room changes. Time moves differently as I listen to Memorial and watch the LP spin on my turntable. On each side when the needle reaches the dead wax loop, I sit there for a moment before I do anything else—which, for me, is as close to a spiritual experience as I get these days.

Memorial is the direct continuation of 2024’s Sacrifice (itself a continuation of 2020’s Ladoga). Where its predecessor burned, this one settles into what remains. Olhava frame Memorial around with the premise “After the fire, there is stillness. Time spent among the ashes.” The album’s lyrics entail multiple simultaneous losses: the dead, love outlived, time irretrievable, and selves left behind. These themes are spliced into four long-form, sighing atmospheric black metal tracks, interspersed with ambience that functions as the connective tissue of this album and its above-mentioned predecessors. Memorial demands to be heard from beginning to end without interruption, without distraction. Nothing short of that will make it click.

On paper, Memorial commits nearly every sin I regularly punish in reviews. I’ve taken albums to task for droning endlessly, for compositions that develop too slowly to justify their length, for passages that substitute mood for substance. I have written more than once that lengthy songs must earn their runtime through contrast, momentum, and meaningful development. By a purely technical application of that standard, Memorial would get the Daniel Hammer. Yet, I fucking love this album. Why? Why does the droning work here when it grates on me elsewhere? Why does twenty minutes of gradual unfurling on “When the Ashes Grow Cold” feel not just earned but necessary, while most other artists’ attempts at the same in a fraction of that time would also bring me to tears (of boredom)?

I think the answer is that Olhava aren’t writing songs so much as conjuring weather patterns. The melodies on Memorial don’t develop the way most songs or riffs do. They form imperceptibly and continuously, like clouds, until you look up and realize the sky is something entirely different than what it was a moment ago. This happens on the album as a whole, but also within the individual tracks. “When the Ashes Grow Cold” is the album’s most immense piece, and its most devastating. The song passes through regions of thrumming ambient restraint and others of total blackgaze obliteration, yet each transition is so gradual that the shift only becomes apparent in retrospect. The droning and ambience are not stasis, but the illusion of stasis—the kind I’ve experienced on mountainsides in a strong wind, watching the sky morph, soaking in the view and not just merely appreciating it.

“The River Wakes,” like its namesake, appears static on the surface. Very little changes in the song in terms of tempo or mood, which masks the constant motion of the whispering melodies and wistful drums underneath the seemingly still water. Subtlety in black metal? Olhava don’t just manage it, they pull it off brilliantly in a closing image so plain it nearly sneaks past you: spring has come and the stream is flowing. After the journey through Memorial, that small, humble joy hits harder than any blast beat could.

Listening to Memorial on vinyl isn’t incidental to how I experience it. Something about the deliberateness of the format—the physical act of lowering the needle, the visual of the label spinning on the platter, the orange variant I have complimenting the slate blue of my turntable, the inability to easily rewind to a part I want to analyze again—mirrors the album’s way of, somehow, both demanding your attention and hypnotizing you with its atmospheric beauty. But, Memorial will not meet you halfway. It has no track to pull from a playlist, no moment to timestamp and send to a friend. What it has is seventy-eight minutes of something I know I need but can’t ever do. A therapist wanted me to find stillness. I couldn’t do it the traditional way, but I found it right here in the ashes and the river—I found it when the needle reached the dead wax, and I wasn’t ready to move.

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Recommended tracks: After I’m Gone, When the Ashes Grow Cold, Memorial, The River Wakes
You may also like: Ultar, Morwinyon, Nullingroots
Final verdict: 9/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Avantgarde Music

Olhava is:
– Andrey Novozhilov (guitars, vocals)
– Timur Yusupov (drums)
With guests:
– Artem Selyugin (screwdriver)