Hailing from Kelowna in British Columbia and making for a proper eve to a Gloomy Sunday of a kind, there’s today the demo released this year back in April by The End Of… (currently Arsgoetia) and remastered in June, which in a brief duration of 23 mins offered an interesting take on the ‘classic’ sound of DSBM focusing on the rawness and lifted up with bit faster tempos.

The well-crafted and clearly thought-out ambience arrangements in the form of eerie, ghastly wails follow up the desperate vocals in the first song, “Elaborate Details Lead to Self Slaughter“, leading to the dissonant and hypnotic second piece, ‘At Risk of Suicide‘. As it promises, this song’s riffs and overall string work with the voices delving deeper into agony could drag the listener into the abyss of oneself, a sense of paranoia well put into sound, falling more repetitive, chanting the title as every note feels like a blade running through the skin.

Even though the screams in this work call for desperation from the very beginning in the most visceral form, after the “ups” of these past two songs, the demo finishes with an ambient interlude in the vein of the previous arrangements that opens to the last song, going with a piano piece as intro, picturing a dark scene of calm after such a storm of emotions, but only offering a damp solace. The vocals burst again, and we close the listen with the last minutes in ‘Total Brain Decay’ with another exercise of dissonant loops carried by the drumming and the bass, mixing with keys and the dramatic howls.

Sadly (to add to all this), and after a single released last year, this is all of The end of…. we could ever have, at least under this very shape. For fans of the crude but less doomy wave of early atmo-depressive black metal, this solid demo is surely for you.