Miasme’s Keep Them at a Distance arrives like a long‑suppressed exhale, the kind that carries years of quiet dread and unspoken longing. After emerging in 2010 as one of the early explorers of blackgaze, the Polish one‑man project has spent years refining its voice in the shadows. What once served as a private outlet for repressed emotion has now crystallized into a work of striking clarity and emotional weight. This new album feels like the moment when all the internal pressure finally condenses into something sharp enough to cut through the fog.
Across six tightly wound tracks, Miasme draws from a lineage of atmospheric and post‑black metal without ever sounding like a mere disciple. The cosmic sweep of Blut Aus Nord’s Memoria Vetusta trilogy lingers in the album’s melodic architecture, while the relentless rhythmic churn hints at the ritualistic gravity of The Ruins of Beverast. Yet beneath the density and distortion lies a melodic vulnerability reminiscent of Sadness — not as ornamentation, but as a way of letting despair glow from within.
The emotional terrain of Keep Them at a Distance is carved from the mundane horrors of everyday life: the suffocation of routine, the static hum of social anxiety, the slow drift of dissociation that turns familiar rooms into foreign landscapes. There is a literary undercurrent too, with Haruki Murakami’s The Wind‑Up Bird Chronicle echoing through the album’s sense of slipping between inner and outer worlds, searching for meaning in the quiet cracks of existence.
Each track feels like a different facet of the same internal struggle. “Radiant Fortress” opens with deceptive brightness before collapsing into a surge of bleak momentum. “Old Father” drags the listener into a doom‑laden crawl, heavy and deliberate. “Wind‑Up Bird” spirals inward, mirroring the disorientation of its namesake. “Blackout” delivers the album’s most punishing rhythmic assault, while “Arms of the Sun” briefly reaches toward warmth only to reveal how fragile that light truly is. The closer, “Shapes in the Fog,” leaves the listener suspended in unresolved tension, as if the album refuses to offer the comfort of closure.
Igor Bińkowski’s complete control over instrumentation and lyrics gives the record a unified, uncompromising vision. Bryce V’s vocals add a raw human edge, cutting through the dense atmosphere with anguish that never feels performative. Alex Sedin’s mastering gives the album the necessary depth and weight, while Maria Piecha’s artwork visually mirrors the themes of distance, distortion, and emotional erosion.
Keep Them at a Distance doesn’t attempt to reinvent atmospheric black metal nor post black — instead, it distills the genre’s emotional extremes into something deeply personal and quietly devastating. It is the sound of someone wrestling with the invisible pressures of daily life and finding, within that struggle, a strange and resonant beauty. For Miasme, this album marks a transformation: a project once defined by youthful catharsis now stands fully realized, confident in its bleakness and unafraid of its own vulnerability.
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Bandcamp: https://miasme.bandcamp.com/album/keep-them-at-a-distance
BLACK METAL CULT 