Style: Post-metal, blackened sludge, ambient (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Cult of Luna, Amenra, Neurosis
Country: France
Release date: 21 March 2025
Enthusiasm for progressive metal is actually a relentless pursuit of novelty. Music of this genre is diverse, transgressive, abrasive, but above all else, wonderfully strange. Through this lens, each stab at originality that a musician takes is commendable; even the most misguided of attempts are unilaterally positive contributions to the medium. Experimentation pushes boundaries. You know the old joke about how the first person to taste cow’s milk must have been really, really hungry? This is an accurate characterization of every prog critic.
Dear reader—I have tasted at the Frenchman’s udder. I have come to know the weird and wonderful. BÅKÜ’s SOMA is excellent. The “OPPOSITE” suite that constitutes this record’s five tracks is a darkly fun psychic exploration. Oftentimes the label of “experimental” is the dinner table stand-in for “it sounds like ass,” but SOMA is the rare album that both abounds and astounds with left-field surprises. It has a wholly unique tongue-print. Rather than try to capture this vibe with so many wafer-thin descriptors, I would like instead to strongly recommend a blind listen to anybody with the slightest predilection for post-metal. I treasured my time with this music.
Sonically, I interpreted SOMA as a collage of unconscious experiences. “Soma” is a Greek root word referring to the body or flesh (as well as the tranquilizing narcotic from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). Save for the occasional brain-in-a-jar, each listener to SOMA is bound by some corporeal form that has been subjected to impulses beyond their control. BÅKÜ casts a fearful mood over these impulses, as if they are intrusions on our somatic reality. Sleep, fear, panic, autonomic processes (thoughtless, like a breath or heartbeat), even natural death: these experiences are part and parcel of living with a human body. They exist in parallel (dare I say OPPOSITE) to our conscious actions and decisions—the control that we believe we have. I ask without disdain: what medium could be better suited to such themes than post-metal, the easiest metal subgenre with which to dissociate?
BÅKÜ demonstrates an astonishing mastery of their genre on this debut album—it is delightfully easy to get lost between the sounds of SOMA. I often think of the Apple Music description of ISIS’s seminal Oceanic: “Post-metal must be an ordeal.” Add a helping of lurching ambience and sludgy riffs and each track off SOMA sounds like a terrific tumble down ten flights of stairs, as later recalled on a morphine drip. A careful hand controls the chaos. Riffs are afforded the exact duration of a welcome stay, slip back to make room for new ideas, reintroduce themselves when appropriate. Some of them are incredibly catchy, too; this allows SOMA to exist in the valley between inviting and off-putting.
“OPPOSITE 1” explicitly states its purpose by sampling English-language medical advice: getting less than six hours of sleep at night will cause a breakdown of the body itself. “Lack of sleep will even erode the very fabric of biological life itself,” the voice forebodes, describing incidents of cancer, sinus disease, and the destruction of DNA before signing off with a tongue-in-cheek “I do hope you sleep well.” Here BÅKÜ gives us the musical equivalent of Rod Serling describing a time he had to get up early for work, then showing us half an hour of graphic combat footage. This passage consists of the only decipherable vocals on the record and sets the tone for what is to come: a picture of lived experience painted with violent ambience.
SOMA—to invoke another fictional drug—is a mélange. Every “OPPOSITE” introduces itself as an individual, separate soundscape. Contrast the world music and cultic hymnal chants that open “OPPOSITE 2” with the ASMR muttering and night sounds that open “OPPOSITE 4.” Synths (credited as oscillateurs) and samples are used liberally to build atmosphere. By the end of the record it is abundantly clear why the band needed three guitarists. BÅKÜ has a gripping fascination with guitar tones and effects that matches the chaotic and diverse energy of its more synthetic elements. The common element threading these songs together is the tortured vocal performance by Daniel Arnoux. “OPPOSITE 3” accompanies his screams with the faintest tinkling of ivories, and the production is so crisp that each catch in his voice can be heard. It is a genuinely affecting listen. SOMA puts both the agony and the theatricality of metal front and center—the atmosphere fits its genre like a glove.
Post-metal has given us vast, churning, meditative works. Cult of Luna’s Mariner, The Ocean’s Pelagial, ISIS’s seminal Panopticon—each is an auditory planetarium of its own making. “Live, Båkü’s strengths are multiplied tenfold,” reads the official description of SOMA on BÅKÜ’s Bandcamp page. “The concert becomes a hardcore pagan ceremony, a moment of shared trance, a collective waking dream…” Having never experienced a BÅKÜ concert even thirdhand, I can not attest to the accuracy of this claim. However, SOMA is so vivid that I am inclined to believe them. The album hints, if not outright demonstrates, that BÅKÜ are capable of writing a classic in the genre. If they bottled this sound, I would not drink it. I would bathe in it.
Recommended tracks: OPPOSITE 3, OPPOSITE 5
You may also like: The Salt Pale Collective, Sumac, Obscure Sphinx, Adrift, Old Man Gloom
Final verdict: 8/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Independent
BÅKÜ is:
– Daniel Arnoux: vocals, guitars, synthesizers, samples
– Mathieu Oriol: guitars
– Thomas Brochier: guitars
– Yoan Parison: bass
– David Esteves: drums
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