“I appreciate modern black metal. The original stuff is not for me at all, but there’s something about a well-polished flame of rage that just works for me. Stepping away from pure, often theatrical, hatred and into such things as emptiness, suffering, frustration—that stuff speaks to me. So when I read that Abseits des Lichts (“Outside of the Light”), the sophomore full-length from the German black metal Grau, lyrically focuses on “pain, emptiness, and the animalistic aspect of the human mind,” well, I was, to put it lightly, intrigued.” Suffering through the holidays.
