Unfyros — Alpha Hunt
Alpha Hunt is the first blacked and grimly low-hanging sonic fruit from Unfyros. They are a Finish two-piece black metal project, which features in its ranks one of the founding members of the ritual ambient collective Aural Hypnox. The six-track CD album focuses on slowed-to-mid-paced BM craft, which at points touches on general dark metal tropes- with the whole thing being very much centred on moody and blacked repetition.
The CD comes presented in a matt digipak, which is released by Aural Hypnox, and surprisingly for the label, which normally creates arty self-made presentations, it’s a factory-made release. It features a sixteen-page inlay booklet- taking in full lyrics and credits, as well a monochrome picture of the two-piece posing with knives, burning doors, and holding tree branches in ritual gowns. The album comes in an edition of 500 copies, and these can be purchased directly from here.
The project started in 2018 as the solo project of Anti Haapapuro- of Aural Hypnox linked projects Aeoga, Arktau Aon, Arktau Eos, Aural Holograms, Halo Manash. And at some point, Nox Vector joined. On the album, Anti is credited with vocals, guitars, bass and synths. And Nox with drums and cymbals. And according to discogs, there was a third member Jari Kaiponen- though looking at his pic on the site, he seems to be a drummer too.
The band's sound is very much about creating a gloomily lumbering-to-crawlingly sinister mood and tone. So there are no major shifts in pace, formal chorus, or anything drastically different from track to track. So as a result on the album's first few plays it may all sound decidedly samey and one note, but if you hang in there you’ll find the devil is in the detail, and in time most of the tracks will start to offer up their own dark charms.
The album opens with “The Dagger Within” which after its brooding intro, kicks into a blend of doomy tolling cymbals and sombrely striking ‘n’ simmer riff craft- which moves between slowed tremolo drifts and grimly black metal slugs. Vocally we get relatively audible blacked growls and almost spoken word gruffness. By track number four “A Numinous Meeting” the vocals have become slightly more of a rolling bay in their attack, and these a set above a blend of sombrely chiming dark metal riffing and grimly cascading tremolo.
Moving into the second half of the album, and we have the more upper mid-paced BM simmer ‘n’ grim glid of “The Cosmogyral Flame”. With bounding ‘n’ smashing percussion locked into a mix of tolling ‘n’ churning riff craft, and blacked bays which almost seem at one with the thick pressing mass of the track. The album plays out with “Onyxian (Abyss-Mother)” which is certainly most eerier moments here, with its mixes of buried simmering keys, and clean and distorted riff craft-which very much walks the line between slowed BM, and darker tone metal craft.
Alpha Hunt is certainly not an album which will blow you away on the first few plays- you need to let its mix of BM and dark metal slowly but surely sink into your bones over repeated plays. A record most certainly for those into the more moody and churningly repetitive side of black metal, and it will be interesting to hear how this project will develop down the line.