Review by Jeger on March 10, 2025.

Life is but a cruel existence where youth is wasted on the young and we're all sentenced to die. We don't know where we came from or where we're going - just turning the wheel - trying to distract ourselves from the inevitable. Remember your youth? It felt like you would live forever. Time went by so slow, but now… Now, we struggle to compute how fast the time goes by, and it's made us understand that the older we get, the faster the time goes. Death is right around the corner, so we scramble to find some kind of fucking purpose before we're not able to do anything but piss ourselves and eat pudding. My purpose, at least for the time being is to reveal to you these concepts, to introduce you to Argentina's Nekyros and to announce the arrival of their debut LP, Nyxian Path, released on March 7 via Northern Silence Productions.

I proclaimed that it is my purpose to review this album. That's because I can relate to its concept so profoundly, but the music. What we have here is a gem. A gem in both style and engineering, or perhaps a diamond in the rough. Stripped-down tonality and that old familiar dry buzz to take in, yet bold as Stout, tremolos flying and mighty bellows that resonate from behind the dense rumble of a perpetual and unrelenting double-bass current. It's been described as a "raw take on black metal", but I couldn't disagree more. This is magnificent… Masterful changes in tempo and fluid transitions into varying riffing techniques. The energy. It's like a vortex. It's like how life feels sometimes as we become locked into our routine and every day becomes the same. Just hemorrhaging time now…

Perfect time for a slow burn. The following track, "The Entrance Pt I" - an epic but melancholy journey into depressive environments where the pain of introspection converges with the bleak atmosphere of the music; creating a most hopeless experience. And then it's back into the vacuum: wailing vocals, soaring guitars and tyrannical percussion. What a depressive affair. I can't help but be reminded of Advent Sorrow's "As All Light Leaves Her" or Nydvind's new "Tetramental II - Telluria" LP.

Everything builds into such an intense crescendo at times - a precisely executed and fluidly melodic crescendo where it feels like something is going to fucking explode, but it's always followed up by something like this here: the Asagraum-heralding melodic passages that are interjected so beautifully into "Fortress Of The Damned". An anxiety attack… That dreadful feeling of losing control or that defeated feeling of just wanting to end it all can both be felt throughout the album. But above all these things, Nyxian Path is just an incredible black metal record from top to bottom.

The energy just keeps you locked in like how you felt the first time you listened to Mgła's "Exercises in Futility" LP. Similar vibes here as well. Digging out from the depths of your very essence everything that makes you miserable with the music now as "The Entrance Pt II" plays out like the soundtrack to tragedy. Never ceasing in its plummet and pulling you under like a whirlpool as you lose yourself to the hypnotic revolution of the track's final minute. Nyxian Path closes with "In The Shores Of Time". No down-tempo'd pretentious epic or some drawn out epilogue, only more of what we've been eating up this entire time. Transcendent! Yet true to its core. True black metal done the Argentine way, and it doesn't get much more irresistible.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10