Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal, Experimental Doom Metal, Experimental Death Metal (Mixed Vocals, Mostly Harsh Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Deathspell Omega, The Ruins of Beverast, Blut Aus Nord, Oranssi Pazuzu, Liturgy, Dissection, Batushka
Country: United States (Deathspiral of Inherited Suffering, Panegyrist, & Maerund), Australia (Elysian Blaze)
Release date: 26 June 2026

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Although he’s only released a single metal record until now—Panegyrist’s 2018 debut record, Hierurgy—visual artist and musician Elijah Gwhedhú Tamu is the single most influential figure for my understanding of the philosophy of metal. For Tamu, black metal is far more real than transgressive theater; he treats the genre as a fully embodied act of worship. He espouses an idiosyncratic form of Christianity centered on the Nicene creed, divine love (caritas), maya (which he interprets both as the power of creation and as love), and a distinctly Neoplatonic relationship between light and darkness (Christus verus Luciferus).¹ I don’t share Tamu’s theology, but I am compelled by his argument that even the most blasphemous black metal bands approach Christianity from a position of reverence, tacitly acknowledging the immense power of spirituality. To me, black metal operates as an ontological assault to the senses, using dissonance, tragedy, and overwhelming scale to evoke the Romantic sublime in pursuit of an ecstatic state. Tamu seems to accept the same musical premises and end goal of transcendence but understands metal’s numinous energy as a call to prayer and the fear of God. 

Now, eight years after Hierurgy, Tamu returns with new music on Sunthema, a colossal ninety-minute split released by I, Voidhanger Records and Rubeus Obex—a label Tamu co-founded with Maerund Arendum Eremite to explore the “darker spectrum of sacred music.” Across its runtime, four projects—Panegyrist, Elysian Blaze, Maerund, and Deathspiral of Inherited Suffering (DIS)—use the vocabularies of extreme metal to explore their respective occult theologies. Rubeus Obex curated the split so that the four contributions would themselves become a sunthema.² I’ll approach Sunthema anagogically, as its creators intended, a vessel of divine transmission, twelve musicians acting as oracles.

Opening up the split are the Memphis-based DIS, who play a form of blackened death metal reminiscent of the Swedish scene. Drawing from both esoteric Christianity and Gnostic cosmology,³ their lyrics describe the violent dissolution of the self. On the lead single, “Resurrectionist,” for instance, DIS evoke nigredo—the alchemical blackening through which the old self must die before spiritual awakening (gnosis) becomes possible:

Here has the body been cut from the soul 

By an ethereal knife 

And reduced to black coal—

At which point I saw myself, 

White as a ghost, 

Haunting my grave by a sunlit rose.

Throughout DIS’s part of the split, though, the band repeatedly explores Christological imagery; for instance, “House of Abysmal Masks” invokes both “His passion and agony” and the image of the “roaring lion.” Read alongside these motifs, the closing line of “Resurrectionist”—“Rise in Glory”—is an esoteric reinterpretation of Christian salvation; martyrdom is an act of self-apotheosis, reclaiming the innate divinity lost in material existence, the soul dissolving back into the infinite chaos beyond the demiurge’s prison. 

DIS write with evocative imagery, yet the music’s structural predictability undercuts its own Gnostic themes. A musical representation of the return to infinite-dimensional chaos—the escape from the cycle of existence in the demiurge’s material prison (alternatively, the deathspiral of inherited suffering)—should be dramatically more unhinged. The opening riffs of “Resurrectionist” are fittingly indebted to Dissection (see footnote 3), and the songwriting is surprisingly melodic and linear. While DIS’s traditional riffs are formidable—particularly the rambling, doomy midsection of “Grailcrushing Wounds” and the infectious, Necrophobic-esque drive of “House of Abysmal Masks”—the music never fulfills its radical gnostic promise. Each song ends with a minute of ambient electronic, faint choral elements, and field recordings, but rather than deepening the atmosphere, they feel like codas tacked on; the textures would have been far more effective woven directly into the eye of the storm itself, where they could have destabilized the band’s otherwise conventional songwriting.

At the polar end of Sunthema lies the debut work from the self-titled project of Heremite, Maerund, which plunges headlong into a obsessive, parasitic, and immolative Christianity. Embracing a radical, Theosophic re-reading of Lucifer as the ultimate “Light-Bringer,” Maerund equates the figure with human free will and the awakening of the divine spark. The inversion of the Edenic curse shines through “Transcendence of the World through the Cross Inverted”: “You are the Sovereign Master, / purifying with Your poison, / killing with the / Tree of Life, / saving with the Tree of Death.” Lucifer and Christ, then, are complementary Promethean forces of the same divine, consuming fire, demanding terrifying, violent submission. On “Manna Pharmakeia,” this takes the form of a plea for kenosis, the total emptying of oneself⁴:

I am not afraid that it be 

Your will, that when 

You infill me, part of me 

You kill. 

Hang on me a mantle 

of life that looks like death.

Musically, Maerund communicates this state of spiritual possession far more intuitively than DIS, playing a ritualistic, claustrophobic style of black metal reminiscent of Esoctrilihum, anchored by restless, chanted vocals that behave as a liturgical mantra. Blast beats drive the four Maerund tracks ever forward at a blistering pace, while the guitars provide a wall of jagged, snaking tremolo textures—although the riffs rarely distinguish themselves melodically, favoring texture over memorability. The production is strikingly clear, defined by an unconventional, prominent bass presence. Above the din, Eremite delivers a glossolalic vocal performance, the layered vocals squawking, growling, snarling, singing, incanting, and howling as if human speech is fracturing under the weight of the divine. And Maerund professes just this on “HAVAH LAHAYLAH,” which begs Christ to “Open up the mouth; open up the gate. / Bring them to alignment; channel molten praise. / When words hit their limit, melt them with Your flame. / Forge a new form that reflects Your burning gaze.” Maerund’s blunt, repetitive song structures don’t necessarily reinvent the avant-garde, but their fanatical execution is undeniably hypnotizing. 

The bookending bands on Sunthema seem restricted by conventional genre boundaries, but Elysian Blaze and Panegyrist face no such limitations. Their contributions entirely transform the split’s scale, turning the record from an above-average compilation of black metal into something approaching the sunthema promised by its creators.

Elysian Blaze—the Australian solo blackened funeral doom project of Mutaatis—presents a masterclass of sonic chiaroscuro; throughout the seventeen-minute behemoth “Ascenturion,” Elysian Blaze constantly returns to a cascade of five choral notes performed in heavenly falsetto. The recurring theme, even one so simple as a C major pentatonic scale, is a structural throughline while providing stark contrast to the crushing weight of the atmospheric doom riffs. Mutatiis understands that darkness is ontologically dependent on light. Swells of distortion crash, leaving behind twinkling keys as spume; the wailed harsh vocals are often layered directly atop the choral arrangements; and furiously-picked, scorching tremolo parts and blast beats enhance the slow-tempo movements that surround them. The production is airy, allowing for dense layers of synths, horns, vocals, guitars, and drums to overwhelm the senses with the music’s cosmic scope without devolving into mud. And the choices of synth and guitar tone are impeccable—in particular during the classic heavy metal guitar solo just before the halfway mark.

The lyrics are governed by the same metaphysics as the music’s interplay of light and darkness, revolving around celestial light as a metaphor for spiritual transfiguration. The death of the star Aldebaran⁵ sets an alchemical chain of transmutation in motion, converting mortality into illumination: “Blood becomes stone, / stone becomes fire, / fire becomes light, light becomes life!” That final line is repeated as a mantra, each recurrence reinforced by luminous synths. And the radiant power of the “diamond seed” serves as the catalyst for ascension, refining the speaker through fire toward an ultimate state of illumination. The song’s closing litany presents the final transfiguration of death, collapsing the passage of time into eternal, divine light:

Death—praise the death of Time. 

Resurrection: ascension light divine. 

Into the night, into the night of beyond, 

Stirring the lamp, watching the embers grow— 

To form Salvation.

Elijah Tamu’s own Panegyrist is the terrifying realization of Sunthema. Following the ethereal “Ascenturion,” Panegyrist’s two tracks see Tamu’s esoteric, Neoplatonic theology realized in vertiginous black metal—technical, avant-garde, and extravagantly maximalist. Traditional heavy and power metal histrionics, contrapuntal string arrangements, classical liturgical chant, and avant-garde black metal form a syncretic statement that is absolutely worthy of the adjectives “transcendent” and “sublime.”

The instrumental agility that Panegyrist display on “Twilight Take Our Faces” is more like technical death metal than black metal orthodoxy, with the frantic bass guitar contorting and weaving beneath multi-channel contrapuntal guitar webs. Each line unfurls as a triumphant melody, but together they meet in strange intervals, creating vile tension out of something beautiful. Richard R.P.S. delivers a fluid bass solo that rivals Beyond Creation, layered beneath hymnal chants before spilling into a disorienting, drunken guitar solo. Three separate lead lines pan across the stereo field, fighting for dominance with each other. Panegyrist’s lyrical theology is opaquely Christian, but the unveiled style of worship leads to vivid lyricism. Twilight becomes a sanctuary. Dusk and shadow conceal the soul from the deceptive sleep of false matter. Tamu demands a total stripping of the ego, as well:

Twilight take our faces, 

That we might for once know ourselves

… 

Reckon the line made known to all: 

Its name is perdition, 

Its name is salvation.

This neoplatonic tension is mirrored by the vocals, which interlock croaky shrieks and throat singing with triumphant, harmonized clean singing, passing seamlessly between the two in natural turning points. After the storm of blast beats and distorted guitars comes the emotional apex of the track: a half-spoken, half-sung homily delivered with terrifying, impassioned conviction, recalling Behemoth’s “O Father O Satan O Sun.” Following the apex, the track interposes the Phos Hilaron, an ancient Christian vesper hymn, sung by a spectral chorus in its original Greek. Concluding with a detached electronic ambience, the track offers the time and space for contemplation of the previous twelve minutes of intensity.

If “Twilight Take Our Faces” is the setting of the Sun, the monolithic “Luciferous” is the midnight coronation of the Christus verus Luciferus philosophy. The track erupts with tumbling drums and labyrinthine guitar lines, whose dissonant pinch harmonics lock in with the bass’s popping attack. The technical vocabulary is absurd; during the pyrotechnic guitar solo a minute in, a five eighth-note delay continues to spiral outward even as Tamu and Brendan Maine launch into synchronized tapping runs, producing an impenetrable geometric web of dissonant tendrils.⁶ The songwriting is fiercely ambitious, too. Around the five-minute mark, a triumphant but unstable riff melts into a Modernist piano melody that quickly engages in a frenetic duel with the guitars—all the while, traditional throat singing drones in the lower register. The musical layers all reach for ecstasy, converging in a single overwhelming vision. 

In “Luciferous,” the spiritual purpose of Sunthema reaches its peak. Tamu weaves Latin fragments from the Exsultet (the Easter Vigil praise of the Paschal candle) and the Ave Verum Corpus (a fourteenth century Eucharistic hymn) to frame Christ as the true unsettling Morning Star, culminating in the declaration: “Ille, inquam, lúcifer, qui nescit occásum” (He, I say, is Lucifer, who knows no setting). Christ plunders hell to bring the primordial fire of freewill to humanity. Throughout the song, Tamu returns to images of transformation: “He is six and also seven:⁷ / Adamah to Adamant⁸ by infernal transformation… / Lightning affixed in carbonous angles, / From Hellgate riseth the Kingdom of Heaven.” 

The second half of the track is ecstatic and all-consuming. Tamu unleashes cries of absolute devotion, shouting the name “Iesous Christos” and chanting the Hebrew Tetragrammaton over ceaseless blast beats. The effect, intensely intimate and frighteningly vast, overwhelms the mind, soul, and body. Tamu quotes Luke 12:49: “I have come to hurl fire upon the Earth; would that it were already ablaze.” The closing strings and woodwinds feel like the silence following revelation.

I don’t share the theology of Sunthema, but I find it impossible, foolish even, to dismiss the artistic vision that animates the split. Across ninety minutes, the four bands play black metal that is terrifying, transfiguring, and overwhelming for performer and listener alike. Not every contribution reaches the same artistic heights—DIS are more conceptually ambitious than musically compelling, and Maerund’s ritual repetition never reaches a feverish high, although Maerund is a good comedown after Panegyrist’s maximalism—but the record’s architecture still benefits from the variety of occult Christianity and black metal styles. Elysian Blaze open the heavens, and Panegyrist ascend to them. The overwhelming conviction with which these musicians pursue transcendence fills Sunthema with divine power. Sunthema is a profound triumph, as a synthesis of four theological imaginations, as a collection of black metal, and as an act of ecstatic devotion.

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Recommended tracks: Ascenturion, Twilight Take Our Faces, Luciferous
You may also like: Esoctrilihum, Midnight Odyssey, Arcturus, Dødheimsgard, Felgrave, From the Waters of Death, Thy Darkened Shade, Nightbringer
Final verdict: 8.5/10⁹

Related links:

– Sunthema: Bandcamp
– Deathspiral of Inherited Suffering: Bandcamp
– Elysian Blaze: Bandcamp | Facebook
– Panegyrist: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram (Elijah Tamu Instagram)
– Maerund: Facebook | Instagram

Labels:
– I, Voidhanger Records
– Rubeus Obex

Deathsprial of Inherited Suffering is:
– Ruaridh L. (fka Thomas Theion) – Lead Guitar, Vocals
– KØVRM – Guitar
– Simon Magus – Bass
– Manus Væcord – Drums

Elysian Blaze is:
– Mutatiis: Everything
With guests:
– Elijah Tamu: additional voices and instrumentation
– Vincent Ippolito: additional voices and instrumentation

Panegyrist is:
– Elijah Tamu: Guitar, Vocals, Orchestration, Lyrics
– Brendan Maine: Guitar
– Vincent Ippolito: Guitar, Synth, Orchestration, Backing Vocals
– David Cramer: Piano, Vocals, Orchestration
– Richard R. P. S.: Bass, Vocals
With guests:
– Chris Dovas: Drums

Maerund is:
– Maerund Arednum Eremite: everything
With guests:
– Vincent Ippolito: drums and percussion
– Elijah Tamu: additional percussion

1. I initially learned of Tamu’s intricate theology in a now-archived interview. I have saved some quotes from it, however. While this isn’t a particularly relevant quote to this review, I like his musings on the transformative power of spiritual dread and will share it since you can’t find it elsewhere: “For those who care enough about truth to be troubled or even righteously angered by my words, I pray you find the hidden threshold revealed—a painful way that has long been hidden in plain sight. Once you see it, what you do with that knowledge is your choice. But you will be marked by the curse and burden of all real gnosis: the ray has pierced your mind and heart, and you can never go back to the false peace of ignorance. If the Lord wills it and gives his blessing, I burn to bring forth a Christian darkness whose magnitude has only been hinted at so far. If suffering is the only way, then I wholeheartedly pray you suffer—not because I take any joy in that, but because I hope for the luciferous transformation that this suffering will bring if you prove your worthiness by admitting that you are unworthy (just as I am unworthy). For all who desire truth above all, may the Spirit of Truth haunt you like an inescapable and incessant burning. May you smoulder in the terrible gaze of the truth! Come, tremble before the darkness of Christ! Perhaps then you will see what you are now too fearful to see—that all along he was the True Lucifer you had unknowingly sought.” For further context on his artistic and spiritual synthesis, see this surviving interview with Invisible Oranges. ↩︎
2. In late Neoplatonism^† and theurgic tradition,^†† a sunthema is a (im)material token from god, implanted within the cosmos by the divine as a mark of participation in a higher reality—the theurgists believe that gods implanted sunthemas across the cosmos, both material and immaterial. They’re not merely symbolic representations of a god but actively participate in that deity’s power, drawing the soul upwards closer to the god/the One. The creators of Sunthema, then, position the split as a literal theurgic device; the act of listening to Sunthema functions as the active contemplation required for spiritual ascension. ↩︎
3. While I don’t think DIS are Chaos-Gnostics (“anti-cosmic Satanists”), their lyricism approaches its themes alongside classical alchemy and Christian theosophy. In Chaos-Gnosticism (pioneered ideologically and musically by the legendary Swedish black metal band Dissection), the material world is viewed as a flawed prison created by a lesser deity, the demiurge; spiritual salvation requires the total dissolution of the self to escape the cyclical entrapment of existence and return to the primordial infinity of Chaos. The belief is like a twisted take on Buddhism. ↩︎
4. In traditional theology, kenosis is Christ’s self-emptying on the cross in complete obedience to God, but here it is also an extremist belief that mankind must also entirely submit to the divine will, even to the point of death. ↩︎
5. I struggled to find the significance of the choice of Aldebaran in the lyrics. My best guess regards the 1880s text The Gospel in the Stars, which forwards the belief that the constellations contain a primordial revelation of the Gospel given by God before written Scripture. Although the Bible explicitly bans astrology in Deuteronomy, The Gospel in the Stars claims that humanity corrupted this original revelation into pagan astrology—the text is not a promotion of practicing astrology. Aldebaran is the brightest star and eye of the Bull constellation, Taurus; and The Gospel in the Stars calls Taurus “a most expressive symbol of Christ as the irresistible and angry Judge,” in which Aldebaran signifies the “Captain, Leader, or Governor.” ↩︎
6. Credit to my peer Cooper for helping me figure out what was happening. ↩︎
7. This is unfortunate wording given the state of Generations Z and Alpha, but six is representative of Christ’s human nature; seven, his divine. ↩︎
8. Roughly translated to mean he is earthly and unyielding. ↩︎
9. Something like 7/10 for DIS; 9/10 for Elysian Blaze; 9.5/10 for Panegyrist; and 7.5/10 for Maerund. ↩︎

^† The Neoplatonists believed in monism, that all reality can be derived from a single principle, the One. Within this framework, the ultimate goal of the soul is to return to the One through spiritual ascension. Everything exists in a hierarchy emanating from the One, followed by the nous (intellect), psyche (world soul), and the phenomenal world. Through contemplation, the soul may detach from the spiritual world. It profoundly shaped the Abrahamic religions, influencing figures like Augustine and, clearly, Elijah Tamu.

^†† Theurgy (divine magic) is the ritual invocation of god(s) with the goal of henosis, unity with the divine. Theurgy is initially from the neoplatonist text the Chaldean Oracles.