A few things surprised me when I first sat down and listened to Call by Urisk. First off, they are an atmospheric black metal band with the black metal cranked up to eleven. They are emotionally deep, but possess a suffocation factor so high that you feel like you’ve got a plastic bag pulled tight over your head. Secondly, their songs are long, but never once feel like it. And thirdly, their singer is female.

Now, before you all start picking up pitchforks and burning torches, allow me to explain what I mean.

I go into reviews as blind as I possibly can if I’ve never heard of a band before. I try to avoid as much of the press blurb that comes along with these releases until after I’ve decided I like the music enough to review it. With some PR companies that’s easy, with others maybe not so much. With Against PR, who sent me this, I got the band name, album title, genre, and release date, and hit play before anything else could muddy my opinion on what Urisk were supposed to sound like.

So when the vocals kicked in, I just naturally assumed that the throat-tearing banshee pouring through my headphones was a bloke. It wasn’t until the clean passage of track one—er, track two, after the obligatory intro—hit, that it finally dawned on me that the person barking like a pissed-off demon on Uprooting was a woman.

And what a vocal performance it is.

It’s a rasping, razor-sharp attack that completely bypasses the usual polished gothic tropes people lazily expect when they hear a female vocalist is fronting an extreme band. There are no operatic airs and graces here. In fact, the contrast between Marleen Bügener’s clean vocals and those sounds that burst from her like the scene from Alien are so stark, so fucking different that you would swear they come from two different people. It’s pure, hostile aggression anchored by a throat-shredding howl that fits the bleak, crushing weight of the instrumentation perfectly.

Which brings me to another surprising fact: Urisk are a duo.

Yes, the promo photos show a five-piece, but three of those members just gig with them, whereas Marleen Bügener and Benedikt Brixius are the only permanent members of the outfit. And where Marleen brings the voice of the damned, Benedikt Brixius gives her the soundscape to paint on.

And what a fucking soundscape.

I wasn’t joking earlier when I said that they were an atmospheric black metal band that lean heavily on the black metal elements, and that the sound, though emotional, will suffocate you.

Urisk do not fuck about.

They go hard.

Fucking hard.

This is music that will pin you to your chair like being blasted in the face by a fucking jet engine. It will hold you firm in place as it spits centuries of bile and anger straight into your face, and yet there is a complexity to the album that you just cannot ignore.

The moments where Urisk do indulge deeper into the atmospheric side of their ideas are just devastating. They are like having an albatross strapped to your neck and being cast adrift at sea.

Behind the noise, there is actual thought at work here too. Call isn’t just a generic collection of misanthropic screams. Formed in Bonn back in 2023, the duo built the concept around ecological collapse, Celtic folklore, and the fading of old traditions. Even the album title plays a clever double game: Call doubles as both the English word and the Scottish Gaelic call, which translates directly to loss.

Across seven tracks, they tackle everything from dying ecosystems to erased cultural heritage, but rather than turning into a preachy folk-metal sermon, they let the fury do the talking. The whole thing was recorded in their own home setup before taking the drums over to Liquid Aether Studios to lay down the rhythm section. That extra work pays off massively. It retains every bit of that raw, unpolished underground grit, but gives the production enough room to breathe so the layered guitars don’t turn into a wall of muddy sludge.

It takes serious confidence to blend progressive arrangements, ancient Gaelic myths, and environmental despair without sounding pretentious or losing your edge, but Urisk pull off the trick without ever losing that sense of sheer fucking weight.

Call drops on October 2nd via Vendetta Records. If you want atmospheric black metal that remembers how to draw blood instead of hiding behind endless reverb and acoustic interludes, do not sleep on this one.