Hauntologist - Hollow (ALBUM REVIEW)

Album release date: January 9th, 2024

I’ll be honest, I was expecting to review this release in February because of this particular post:

But here we are. I suppose the folks at No Solace decided to push this one out ahead of schedule when they saw it leaked on one particular torrenting site for metal music (which I won’t name here).

Now, a bit of background about Hauntologist!

Some half a year after their 2022 tour with Mgła, Michał “The Fall” Stępień and Maciej “Darkside” Kowalski announced that they were recording new materials (which we later knew, of course, was for Hauntologist).

Trivia: The Mgła gang is well-known for their wide catalogue of music that isn’t under said banner: while off-duty, The Fall makes his own music under another project Over the Voids…, plays drums for Ashes and Eschatology, as well as fronts his own black metal/punk band Owls Woods Graves, which Mgła frontman Mikołaj “M.” Żentara and live guitarist Piotr “E.V.T.” Dziemski play bass and guitar in, respectively; while Darkside also lay down his own tasteful drumlines in Kriegsmaschine, a (formerly main) side project of M.

Being a fan of No Solace’s catalogue that I am, my anticipation for Hollow was pretty high, to say the least. I quite liked the single (which serves as the album’s opener) “Ozymandian” - it was not groundbreaking in any manner, but a solid black metal track nonetheless; and thus I waited for the day that is today, when the full album is released.

But how the album sounds is far from even my wildest imagination, and shatters my expectation. Partly.

Before I dive into analyzing it in depth, let it be a discretion that stipulates as follows:

Anyone who is about to listen to Hollow for the first time should NOT have the expectation that this is a black metal album. Because it is not.

Described on the No Solace Instagram page as “experimental” and" “[leaning] towards other genres and forms of expression”, I’d say Hollow delivers exactly that, in very even proportions: 50% black metal, 50% other genres.

Let’s talk about the black metal half first.

This is the half of the album that screams “FFO Mgła and anything in that vein”; with the exception of “Deathdreamer” feeling like something coming from Owls Woods Graves - probably due to the punk element in it, though the riffage of the tracks helps it sound fresh and different. Unfortunately, the other three songs of this half, “Ozymandian”, “Golem”, and “Autotomy” feel like extensions to the Mgła archetype: if I must, I can, and will even say what album each of these track reminds me of (hint: it’s the stuffs from With Hearts Toward None onward).

The other, non-metal half is where it gets dicey.

“Waves of Concrete” is an one-and-a-half-minute ambient interlude that leads to the punky “Deathdreamer”, and that’s all about it. The title track, however, is something from the left field that catches listeners off-guard: an eight-minute ballad with plodding toms and cymbals, a main riff that serves as the track’s pulse, and clean singing from The Fall. The final two minutes builds up into a post-black metal closer for the track - highly reminiscent of something like Agalloch, Alcest, or even Harakiri For The Sky.

The last two tracks in Hollow, also in the non-metal half, are where the album pushes itself even further away from what is considered “metal”. “Gardermoen” is a song that swings itself between post-rock and post-punk yet somehow still is thematically cohesive to the entire album: think Oh Hiroshima and If Trees Could Talk plus the depressive vibe of Molchat Doma. The album ends with a minimalistic, stripped-back closer “Car Kruków” - one clean guitar, a playback of a woman talking, with a keyboard section near the end that makes for a subtle, yet equally (wait for it) hollow end to the sonic journey.

Such an eclectic assortment of genres within one single album proves to be a double-edged blade: though none of the tracks feels like it doesn’t belong to the whole thing nor out-of-place, how the duo chose to arrange the tracks ended up hurting the listening experience: most notably, the abrupt shift of style between “Autotomy” and “Gardermoen” made me raise my eyebrow and broke my immersion into the album.

In summary, the debut release by Hauntologist was rather a rollercoaster with diverse offerings that took listeners to different means of expression. It is to be said, however, that such diversity can mar the overall enjoyment. Personally, I find this to be somewhat of a disappointment, but it’s worth remembering that it’s only my opinion at the end of the day.

What opinion on the album you hold is, and should be ultimately determined by your thoughts when you give Hollow a listen yourselves - which can be done right here: