After a handful of singles released throughout 2023, Moroccan multi-instrumentalist Alias unveils his debut EP with The Black Dominion. Its atmosphere is icy and wind-lashed, like winter in the Atlas Mountains, which stretch across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Across a little over half an hour, the musician offers four sacrifices, among them “Black March,” a cover of Poland’s Infernum, originally released in 2005 on what would become their final album, Farewell.
Alias fuses all the rawness of black metal with the grotesque, austere beauty of nature, aiming to conjure a dark, immersive atmosphere. At times, though – as the self-titled opener makes clear – that rawness is peeled away layer by layer until it’s ground down to the bone, leaving nothing but marrow. This is especially noticeable in the weak drum mix: you hear the cymbals and everything metallic, but the rest of the kit is missing, leaving the music without a heartbeat. Maybe that’s the point: maybe the life has been picked clean by crows that caw here and there.
The EP gains strength with “On the Black Path” and “Dawn of Steel”, which, although they share many similarities, I consider the record’s high points: solid riffs strongly influenced by Norwegian black metal, and keyboards that work like ritual chants, guiding us straight into the eye of the storm that is The Black Dominion.
Like black metal’s roots, gnarled and buried deep in frostbitten soil, this EP draws its power from what came before: in many ways, it’s a tribute, both to the style itself and to Infernum. May Alias’s path remain black.
Listen to “On the Black Path” on Bandcamp:
