Band:	Austere
Album:	Beneath The Threshold
Style:	Depressive black metal
Release date:	April 2024

01. Thrall
02. The Sunset Of Life
03. Faded Ghost
04. Cold Cerecloth
05. Words Unspoken
06. Of Severance

Making up for lost time.

Comebacks of acts that received acclaim but never really seemed to properly capitalize on it are always prone to high expectations. Stuff that makes you wonder whether the band itself still has it in them to reach the same level of quality or whether what worked then might not work now with how the scene itself evolved. It is clear that DSBM and blackgaze right now are not in the same fruitful position they were back in the late 2000s, when Austere released their classic two albums, Withering Illusions And Desolation and To Lay Like Old Ashes. There was something unique about them, maybe because Australia isn't the first country you'd think of given the more icy feeling of atmospheric black metal and its adjacent genres despite a pretty fruitful scene, and yet there was something "warm" about Austere.

Last year saw Austere come back after a 14-year hiatus with an album called Corrosion Of Hearts, one that was a pretty good return, one that I had hoped for when I saw their first ever live show. Though I am now a bigger fan than I was when I saw that performance, a lot of it has been because of the Austere of now rather than the classics, with all the due respect I have for them. I don't think that it sounds like time never passed for the band, but I think that what they do now, with slightly less DS in their BM and a more straight-forward atmospheric black metal sound is something that works in the current context.

Sure, that part about it being more straight-forward also means that some of what made Austere unique in the first place is diminished in favor of something that's more streamlined. Normally I'd be pretty bummed about such a direction, but on one side, it's not as extreme as I'm making it out to be, and second, the band is really great at their craft so the howls and the melodies are fantastic regardless of how streamlined their form is. I was as surprised to see how quick they were to follow-up their past album, and I suspect that the songs on the two albums were written around the same time rather than consecutively, with Corrosion Of Hearts having had the more structurally interesting four long songs structure, and Beneath The Threshold, while still having long songs, sounding more gothic-tinged (especially in those clean vocals I'm not fully sold on) and infused with post-black metal akin to something like Harakiri For The Sky.

I'm not sure if Austere have even more songs to show for their absence in their bag, and the slight shifts in sound from the two albums they did so far since must mean that they're ready to not fully repeat themselves. Time will tell if the more straight-forward nature will work in the long run, but as far as Beneath The Threshold is concerned, it makes for a damn good album.