Band: ASTARIUM
Country: Russia
Title: Hyperborea
Label: Grimm Distribution / Gravacoes Tunguska
Year: 2020
Style: Symphonic Black Metal

Review:
The king of Synthetic Symphonic Black Metal is back with a new full-length album, the eight, just one year after the previous was released, out on Grimm Distributions (a division of Satanath Records), and a label I haven't heard of until now, Gravacoes Tunguska. I often review SiN's work, and to be honest if at first I was skeptical about it, about its potential to convince the nowadays listener, I grew into really liking all his work. After receiving the new album I had a curiosity and went online to see how others think of SiN's work, and not little was my surprise to see all this appreciation and praise of his music, it means many, many more people started to like this type of very synthetic (all instrumental part is programmed instead of executed on real instruments I believe, or at least that's how it sounds like) Symphonic Black Metal that could have been something not usual but not surprising, in the mid '90's when keyboards were at their incipient phase in this style, but nowadays when there are so many possibilities it's almost impossible to find similar music out there. The truth is SiN's ability in creating very catchy, mysterious, dark sounding keyboard atmospheres is outstanding, and that's Astarium's highlight, its keyboard work, but other than that the song writing is good as well, clever and tension building, not at all boring or linear, with a ton of twists and turns where the listener is always surprised with something new. Basically all what I said above can easily apply to Astarium's new album, too, with the mention that it is getting better and better as time goes by, so if you're familiar with SiN's work so far you can be sure this new album won't disappoint you, and if you haven't heard of Astarium so far go check it out, you might have a big surprise; one thing if for sure, one either loves it, or hates it, there's no middle ground here.
Reviewed by Adrian
Rating: 8.5/10

Contact:
astarium.bandcamp.com
grimmdistribution.bandcamp.com
tunguskarecordings.bandcamp.com