BLACK SPIKES 'Ydos'

BLACK SPIKES
Ydos
Napalm Records

Somewhere deep in the Lithuanian woods, there is a cabin. The fire is still burning, although you don’t remember lighting it. Something is chanting beyond the trees. You’re not completely sure whether you walked here, dreamed yourself here, or somehow got dropped into somebody else’s nightmare. There’s probably a book in the basement that every viewing of The Evil Dead has taught you not to open, and somewhere in the back of your mind The Cabin in the Woods is screaming, absolutely nothing about this place is what it seems. Then there’s that other feeling, the one Dreamscape played with back in 1984: the uncomfortable realization that you aren’t simply watching somebody’s nightmare anymore. You’re inside it. BLACK SPIKES are somewhere in that cabin. Naturally, I opened the fucking door!

BLACK SPIKES came across my YouTube or Apple Music feed six, seven, maybe eight months ago, and my reaction was immediate. I wanted more! I wanted to see this band live, wanted to hear what they did next, and when I found out their second album, 'Ydos', was coming through Napalm Records, I didn’t wait for somebody to hand me the assignment. I went to my editor at KNAC and specifically asked to review it!

I already knew BLACK SPIKES could be heavy. What I didn’t know was how far down those cellar stairs they were prepared to take me. The Lithuanian five-piece, featuring Agni on vocals, Yaga on guitar and electronics, Mazvis on guitar, Sime on bass, and Titas on drums, built 'Ydos' around human vices, creating a dark fairy tale where those vices take on personalities and stories of their own. I’ve listened to plenty of concept albums over my lifetime, some I absolutely love and others I couldn’t wait to turn off, and if you’re going to make one, you have to commit to the fucking concept. The album has to flow. The atmosphere needs to survive from one song into the next. You can’t throw a few great ideas together, sprinkle unrelated bullshit through the middle, and then tell me it all belongs because the liner notes say so. 'Ydos' actually flows, and more importantly, it creates a place.

For me, that place lives somewhere between an old European fairy tale, the nightmare logic of Dreamscape, and a cabin buried so deep in the woods that Ash Williams should probably already be looking for his chainsaw. “PASAKA,” meaning “Fairy Tale,” doesn’t immediately attack. It creeps underneath you with low ambient noise, the sound of fire burning somewhere in the background, and Agni entering more like she is chanting than singing. BLACK SPIKES let that buildup breathe, and it feels dreamlike without ever feeling peaceful. This isn’t some bright fantasy landscape; it feels older, maybe the 1700s or 1800s. Like a village surrounded by forest where everybody knows you don’t leave the road after sunset, but nobody wants to explain why. Then “MOTINA” arrives, and the cabin door shuts behind you. The atmosphere from “PASAKA” slides almost directly into the track before, somewhere around that minute-and-a-half mark, the whole thing tears itself open. Agni unleashes some absolutely disgusting vocals, and I mean disgusting in the best possible way, while blast beats and crushing guitars come crashing in behind her. If you walked into 'Ydos', having no clue what BLACK SPIKES sounded like, “MOTINA” is where the band introduces itself properly. Extreme metal aggression, blackened atmosphere, industrial electronics, melody, and some absolutely punishing guitar work all collide. “MOTINA” fucking rips!

What makes 'Ydos' work, though, is that brutality is only one part of BLACK SPIKES’ identity. You can hear progressive metal, industrial music, black metal, death metal, modern metal, and pieces of that spoken-word or nu-metal cadence from the ’90s and early 2000s, but the album never sounds like a collection of disconnected influences. “MELAS” might be the first track where that becomes completely obvious. For maybe fifteen seconds, the opening feels like I somehow walked into a 1994 rave hall, with spoken-word vocals riding over electronics before the scenery suddenly changes. The riffs get crunchy; the breakdowns start landing, and Agni goes from mesmerizing higher vocals into gutturals that would probably get a nod of approval from Corpsegrinder. 

The rave disappears, and now you’re standing inside a barren cabin somewhere in Lithuania wondering why there are blast beats coming from the basement. “MARA” pulls the attack back slightly but keeps all the pieces intact, and around the three-minute mark BLACK SPIKES spend roughly 45 seconds exposing something I had already been hearing beneath the surface: somebody in this band has some serious black metal in their musical DNA. The guitars, atmosphere, and entire feel of the song suddenly change before BLACK SPIKES transition seamlessly back into the original melody, just like nothing happened. No awkward cut. No moment where it feels like another song was pasted into the middle. It simply belongs there.

“ZELVAR” became one of my favorites almost immediately. Yes, it gives you more English than most of 'Ydos', but that has almost nothing to do with why I kept replaying it. I don’t speak Lithuanian, and honestly, I love that BLACK SPIKES use their own language rather than reshaping themselves around an English-speaking audience. What grabs me with “ZELVAR” is much more primitive: that fucking riff! At this point, in the record, you understand some of the BLACK SPIKES recipe, but this song locks into a crushing guitar groove with what sounds like pinch harmonics running throughout it, and eventually you realize your head has been moving for the last thirty seconds without you consciously telling it to. Sometimes the best test of a riff isn’t analyzing how complicated it is; your neck tells you first. I can already picture this song live. I’m not saying BLACK SPIKES sounds like CANNIBAL CORPSE here, because that isn’t the comparison. I’m talking about the physical crowd reaction when a riff hits and everybody along the front rail grabs the barrier and starts headbanging together! “ZELVAR” has that kind of groove.

“REVANA” is also where I finally understood why some listeners have compared BLACK SPIKES to bands like INFECTED RAIN, IN THIS MOMENT, or even SPIRITBOX. Initially, I didn’t really hear it. Visually or from a stage-presentation standpoint, sure, I could see somebody painting with that broad brush, but musically BLACK SPIKES sounded considerably nastier to me. “REVANA” is where that comparison makes more sense. The beginning brings the aggression down enough to lock into a recognizable modern-metal groove, with this chainsaw-like guitar chug that keeps your head moving without needing to sprint. You almost get comfortable, which on an album like 'Ydos' should immediately make you nervous. Somewhere around the three-minute mark, Agni unleashes one of those extreme-metal screams and the back portion of the song erupts into a death-metal-style finale. It’s well engineered and structured, bringing you in with something familiar before finishing you off with a crushing disaster piece.

By track seven, BLACK SPIKES finally gave me the first song that doesn’t immediately make me want to smash replay. “APATIJA” is the first slight dip on 'Ydos', but I want to be clear about what I mean by dip. I’m not saying it is bad. BLACK SPIKES simply set the bar so damn high through the first six tracks that this is the first time I found myself saying, “Okay, this is good,” instead of “Holy fucking shit!” It leans harder into the modern-metal side, with more groove and a little more rock-and-roll movement while the extreme-metal dial gets turned down. There’s a brief section around the middle where that nastier side pushes through again before the song settles back into itself. If I have to wait until song seven, before the album gives me something that is simply good instead of fucking amazing, I’m not complaining much. 

“AUREA” continues some of that restraint but uses it differently, giving Agni’s higher range more space and bringing an almost weightless, dreamlike quality into the album. It reminded me again of Dreamscape, where one environment can feel peaceful for a moment before suddenly turning hostile without warning. Somewhere around the latter half, BLACK SPIKES let the brutality break through again, then slowly allow the weight to lift. “AUREA” isn’t one of my favorites, but it fits the world they’ve built. Eight songs in, I still haven’t found anything I would call bad. I’ve found good songs, great songs and some fucking amazing songs.

Then comes “SENAS DEMONAS.”

Every album I review, I try to find the one song that belongs in the live set. Sometimes I need to think about it. Not here. BLACK SPIKES, put “SENAS DEMONAS” in the fucking live set. This is hands down my favorite song on 'Ydos', and for me it feels like the culmination of everything the band spent the previous eight tracks constructing. The guitar work is crushing, the drums beat the hell out of you, Agni moves through seemingly every extreme of her vocal range, and the band jumps from melody to aggression, drops away, picks everything back up, and never makes you question a single transition! If Dreamscape got you into the nightmare and The Cabin in the Woods got you into the basement, “SENAS DEMONAS” is where The Evil Dead takes over. The cellar is open, everything is loose, whatever was chanting outside is now in the room, and somebody better find the fucking chainsaw. More importantly, this is the wall-of-death song. I can already see the room split, everybody backing up, waiting for BLACK SPIKES to bring that section around and then letting the whole fucking floor collapse into itself. That’s what I look for when I pick a live song during an album review. I don’t simply want the best track on headphones. I want something that makes me immediately picture what happens when hundreds of people hear it together. “SENAS DEMONAS” does exactly that!

“DULKĖS” then gives 'Ydos' the ending it deserves without trying to out-heavy the song before it. At nearly five minutes, BLACK SPIKES take elements from everything they’ve done across the previous nine songs and weaves them into the finale. The electronics return, along with the spoken-word/nu-metal-style flow, melody, harmonies, harsh vocals, crashing double bass, blast beats, those flashes of black metal, and the guitar work that has carried so much of the album. It feels like the entire world of 'Ydos' condensed into one final piece. It isn’t my favorite song; we settled that argument with “SENAS DEMONAS,” but it is a great closer. 

Then the final seconds begin to disappear. The noise slowly dissipates, the cabin gets quiet, the fire burns down, and the dream starts collapsing around you. If you leave the album playing on repeat, “PASAKA” begins again and suddenly you’re back where you started: fire, chanting, woods, cabin. That may be my favorite atmospheric detail on the whole record. Whether BLACK SPIKES specifically engineered that transition to work as a loop or I simply discovered it because I kept replaying the album, it feels perfect. Like the best nightmare logic in Dreamscape, you think you’ve escaped because the scenery changed, only to discover you’re still inside the dream.

One of the things I was curious about before sitting down to properly review 'Ydos' was how I would approach an album where I couldn’t simply read most of the lyrics and pull out lines to support what I was hearing. This is the first record I’ve reviewed where that language difference became a real consideration, and in the end, I didn’t fucking need the translation to connect with it! The music communicates enough. Agni communicates enough. I don’t need to understand Lithuanian to recognize anger coming through somebody’s lungs. I don’t need subtitles to hear desperation, menace, or sadness. I can feel the atmosphere change when the guitars shift underneath her or when Titas explodes into blast beats. The electronics, riffs, melodies, and vocals communicate something before the meaning of individual words ever becomes important. That became one of my favorite things about 'Ydos'.

And as somebody who loves guitar-driven metal, BLACK SPIKES give me what I need. Give me riffs. Give me crunch. Give me guitar parts that make my head move. But riffs by themselves are never enough. There has to be melody wrapped around them, something connecting the heaviness instead of forty minutes of somebody proving how heavy their guitar tone can sound. BLACK SPIKES understand that balance. I can hear black metal buried inside this record. I can hear early metalcore influences, death metal, industrial music, modern metal, progressive elements, and groove, but BLACK SPIKES don’t sound like a band desperately trying to prove how diverse their record collection is. They sound like BLACK SPIKES.

For a second album, 'Ydos' is an impressive piece of work. It isn’t perfect. “APATIJA” and “AUREA” don’t hit me with the same force as the first six tracks, and that keeps me from giving the record the full five. But there isn’t a song here I would call bad. There are good songs. There are great songs. And there are tracks that made me hit replay before I was ready to continue.

4.5 Out Of 5.0

Now somebody needs to get this band across the Atlantic. I said it while listening to the album, and I’ll say it again: give me BLACK SPIKES and KANONENFIEBER on a North American run. Find one more European band that fits somewhere inside that dark little world and send the package through the United States and Canada. Metal fans are constantly saying they want something new. BLACK SPIKES are standing in the Lithuanian woods waiting for you.

Just remember: if you find the cabin, don’t open the book!
And if you wake up afterward, make sure you actually woke up!