Review: Nishaiar – Enkbera

Style: post-rock, new age, shoegaze (mixed vocals, mostly clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Alcest, Myrkur, Enya
Country: Ethiopia
Release date: 1 October 2025

Yadda yadda lightning in a bottle; Nishaiar captured that with 2021’s blackgaze masterpiece Nahaxar. You try writing 75+ reviews in a year and not starting with a cliche every now and again. Enkbera forces me to use one. Enkbera is their third release this decade for the Ethiopian cosmic black metal pioneers, after Nahaxar and Enat Meret, the latter of which I was disappointed with. Only ten months later and the quintet are back with Enkbera, a record which the band promises to be “not just music — it is a horizon unfolding in slow motion, inviting you to step across.” I don’t really care about my albums being horizons to step across in all honesty, so have Nishaiar at least recaptured the brilliance of Nahaxar musically?

Continuing the sonic progression from Nahaxar to Enat Meret, the black metal aspect of Nishaiar’s sound is completely eschewed on Enkbera, leaving just a few modern Alcest-lite riffs of frail shoegaze (“DEH,” “ECNE”). Nishaiar has fully embraced being new age-y post-rock, a genre combo which simply doesn’t work with the song structures here. Enkbera is twelve short tracks, all sub-five minutes, but new age-y post-rock necessitates lengthy buildups. The brief “buildups,” if they can be called that, don’t leave any “climaxes” with the ability to hit hard, just the lame attempts at wall-of-sound shoegaze. Not that they would hit hard even with appropriate buildups: every single one is just open strumming of a simple repeated chord with Enat Meret’s meek female vocals dreamily singing gibberish atop—Nishaiar sing in a made up language, as far as I can ascertain. Even the longest track, the 4:56 absolutely gigantic, mammoth post-rock epic “NE,” doesn’t use its length to do anything at all, oscillating between bland synth spaff and the repetitive buildups mentioned earlier. The tracks without pitiful attempts at climaxes are spa-music filler that you could purchase a CD of at any shop which sells crystals (“TDEBE” is the obvious offender).

Beyond being as boring as filling out paperwork, Enkbera is one of the most physically annoying releases I’ve ever had the displeasure of turning on. There is CONSTANT reverb. You are hearing triple the entire time Enkbera is on, and it’s infuriating. The vocals are ceaselessly clipping, as are the instruments, as if the whole album were glitched. Our Subway production expert Cooper tells me: “there’s just too many high frequency sounds competing for the same frequency space. The cymbals and the reverb on the vocals clash especially. Those all create an ice picky high effect thats very unpleasant. I’d also describe the reverb as reedy, and I feel it contributes to the issue.” The past has proved Nishaiar are competent at producing—even if Nahaxar is a little rough around the edges, its sound is pleasant enough—so this must be an artistic choice. To create one of the worst sounding albums I’ve ever heard. I would rather listen to a hundred variations of slam snares or St. Anger or anything from that period when I didn’t realize my phone was stuck in mono audio. Enkbera is pure incompetence. The obnoxiously fake choirs and banal synth tones hardly even register beneath the abysmal, clipped reverb. Oh yeah, it also has some volume issues during each and every little reverberation; I’m not an audio engineer, but I think the volume is raised at the start and pushed down right after, over and over.

Enkbera is one of the most artistically vapid releases I’ve ever heard from a band with a genuine masterpiece under their belt, and only four years ago at that; 72 Seasons at least happened forty years into Metallica’s career. From being quite literally headache-inducing due to the constant shifts in volume and auditory blurriness to the stale songwriting that progresses nowhere, Enkbera is a colossal failure in every facet of music. Moreover, I didn’t mention the clearly AI album cover for Enat Meret, but with even the band members’ “pictures” on Bandcamp being AI generated now, that aspect of Nishaiar needs to be ridiculed, too. Enkbera is vapid and almost tarnishes the legacy of Nahaxar for me. This sort of laziness seems to be correlated with bands who use AI art, doesn’t it?

Recommended tracks: DEH, ECNE
You may also like: Eldamar, Violet Cold, Medenera, Nelecc, Celestial Annihilator
Final verdict: 2/10

Related links: Bandcamp Facebook | Metal-Archives

Label: independent

Nishaiar is:
– Explorer of the Abyss (bass)
– Arcturian Night (drums)
– Lord of Zenadadz (guitars, vocals)
– Lycus Aeternam (keyboards, vocals)
– Enat Meret (vocals)