Karma Noir stare into fate and find something monstrous looking back

For Brussels-based metal outfit Karma Noir, their eponymous new single takes the raw hardcore instincts of their earlier material and pushes them into something denser, darker and far more cinematic, combining deathcore weight, black-metal tremolo riffs, dissonance and almost tribal rhythms with a surprisingly melodic core.

Guest drummer Jo Nunez gives the track an enormous physical presence, while the layered guitars create a sense of pressure that rarely lets up. Yet the track isn’t brutal for its own sake. The band repeatedly offset aggression with more atmospheric sections and an Eastern-tinged melodic chorus, creating the kind of contrast that makes the heavier passages land even harder.

The lyrics circle around fate, unconscious forces and the uneasy possibility that human beings may have far less control over their lives than they like to believe. Karma Noir frame that idea through the opposite concepts of sorrow and transcendence, brutality and melody, past and future, and attraction and repulsion.

Producer Gerald Jans helps give the song the scale it needs, balancing the thicker modern production with more spacious, cinematic moments. The decision to retain touches of old-school metal production, including stereo panning and a less polished edge, also prevents the track from becoming too clinical.

But the band aren’t abandoning the hardcore, thrash and early metalcore foundations that shaped them. They are enlarging them, allowing atmosphere, melody and existential unease to become just as important as impact.

And for a song named after the band itself, that feels significant. Ultimately, ‘Karma Noir’ is the moment this band discovered what it could become.