Style: Progressive metal, post-metal, doom metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Mastodon, Gojira, The Ocean, Psychonaut
Country: Australia
Release date: 8 May 2026

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The lengths we go to to find you new music, I tell ya. Sandblasted and sunburnt, I found myself on my hands and knees in the Nile river basin, crouched over a plaque dotted by hieroglyphs. A quick translation allowed me to decode the arcane instructions, and I followed them to a temple with looming, jackal-headed figures eroded by time standing as pillars. Inside, at the centre of the silent mausoleum, was a plinth, and upon the plinth was an object. With sandpaper in my throat, I wiped the object of its four-thousand year old film of dust. The screen lit up. Success! I had found the fabled Apple Music library of pharaoh Akhenaten. However, with the elation of discovery came a terrible curse: a U2 album that I can never delete. 

Of course, Akhenaten didn’t really own an iPhone¹, but if he did, he might’ve listened to Black Sea of Trees. The Australian foursome’s sophomore album, Cult of the Sun, draws on occult symbology to tell the story of the forgotten pharaoh as a king promised transcendent power only to realise he’s been indoctrinated into a cult². Built on a foundation of post-metal and Byzantine scales, Cult of the Sun contrasts juddering grooves with psychedelic atmospheres and contemplative acoustic noodling. Vocalist Samuel Exton utilises a range of moods: throaty lows, melismatic vocal runs in a lamenting tenor, death growls, and more blackened wails.

If “Divinity” opens the album in a slightly cliched Middle Eastern style with its ominous Byzantine vocal scales, it can be forgiven for capably setting the scene before the explosion of “A Red Dawn”. Showcasing doomy riffs and mournful lead licks, the track subsides to reveal serene sections with lamenting cleans and restrained instrumentation, before closing with belting ornamental yearnings and agonised harshes over a portentous riff. Ebbing and flowing between heavier and lighter moments, the track is a perfect microcosm of Cult of the Sun. Unfortunately, this does speak to one of Black Sea of Trees weaknesses: a lot of the record recapitulates the same ideas in slightly different form over and over at a largely unvarying tempo. 

But when your central idea is pretty good, that’s not the worst criticism in the world. “Servant to the Sun” centres a djentier syncopated riff and benefits from some string accompaniment; “Omen” utilises some rather hostile sounding ambiences to strong affect; and “Visions of a Crimson Moon” features chiming synths and builds to an Opethian outro, employing Akerfeldtian mainstays like an acoustic passage into a Phrygian lead guitar part, and diminished riffs of satisfying complexity. The title track strikes up some pacier riffs although they’re rather fleeting—Black Sea of Trees hurry back to more comfortable tempos and chugs. Across Cult of the Sun, there are intriguing ideas on display, but they struggle to shine against the compositions at large which blot them via a murkiness of similar sounding scales, riffs and vocal melodies. 

Unfortunately, Cult of the Sun ends up feeling longer than its fifty-one minute runtime and this is largely due to the uniformity of the composition: the Nubian scales, florid vocalwork, doomy sensibility, juddering riffs, and agonised screams should all add up to a perfect formula, but, by and large, Black Sea of Trees veer back and forth between softer and heavier iterations of the same ideas over and over. By the time “Eclipse” plays the album out, these compositional tropes have been reiterated so often that the track itself feels wholly predictable; the cumbersome chugging which plagues the album feeling particularly grating by this point. And while the mix is clean, its sterility also impacts enjoyment leaving riffs that should punch like prizefighters all too lacking in muscle and drums that should pound weighing mere ounces. Cult of the Sun’s reliance on contrast simply isn’t reflected in the production. All of this makes for a frustrating listen—an album you want to love for all its obvious merits and objective coolness, but one with unignorable flaws that become more pronounced with repeat listens.

What does it take to endure for thousands of years? Big stone monuments. Black Sea of Trees don’t have big stone monuments, but they do have a solid foundation on which to build something truly impressive. Some stumbles in dynamics and a tendency to rehash similar ideas make Cult of the Sun feel all too monotonous, like a recitation of pharaohs without the historical colour to differentiate them. But Black Sea of Trees also have a clear vision and the talent to go further; Ancient Egypt wasn’t built in a day, after all.

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Recommended tracks: A Red Dawn, Visions of a Crimson Moon, Cult of the Sun
You may also like: Sunnata, Anciients, Sikasa
Final verdict: 6.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Black Sea of Trees is:
– Samuel Exton (vocals, guitar)
– Jan Schotting (drums)
– Francesco Adami (bass)
– Chris Schwinghamer (lead guitar)

1.  The prevailing theory among Egyptologists is that he had an iPod Shuffle. ↩︎
2.  Akhenaten was largely lost to history for a long time thanks to his disastrous decision to abandon polytheistic worship and instead centre religion around the figure of Aten, a god of the sun. Tutankhamun, who ruled shortly after (it’s uncertain who Akhenaten’s immediate successor was; Tutankhamun may also have been Akhenaten’s son, we simply can’t be sure) reinstated polytheistic worship, and almost all evidence of Akhenaten’s rule was erased—statues were hidden or destroyed and his name was excluded from lists of Pharaohs. ↩︎