Band:	〇
Album:	Entity
Style:	Depressive black metal, Doom metal
Release date:	August 2020

01. None
02. Reduced Beyond The Point Of Renewal
03. Grasping The Outer Hull Of The Tangible
04. (Em)Pathetic
05. Conjoin The Vacuous
06. An Idiosyncratic Mirage

At first I though "Huh, another O album already? We already got a pretty good one this year, what's the rush?", but then I realized exactly who this band actually is and my spine tingled.

Let me preface by saying that 〇 were really uninspired in their choice of a name, considering all the trials and tribulations I have to go through to find their album on Bandcamp. Not only did I mistake them for O and (0) (both bands who released great albums this year), but also it seems that they go by 0 on Bandcamp instead of the "〇" that we got. And the worst part is that a lot of search engines or music tagging engines consider '0' as "missing" or "unknown". Try searching for "0" here on MS, or try scrobbling artist 0 on last.fm, you'll have a really shitty time. And even if you go by the circular name that we got, you might end up with the wrong circle symbol instead of the "Ideographic numer zero symbol". Otherwise you'll end up with a similarly named ambient band. And it's not like Entity is such a specific name, so your best shot is usually searching for Null & Void, the name of their previous album. No luck. With that out of the way, holy shit! A new 〇 album!

Back when I was first getting into Icelandic black metal and basically devouring everything that was from there and had a black metal label, something about how enigmatic the name 〇 seemed drew me in, and with them only ever having one song (but a really long album-spanning one) was only adding more to the mystique. Sure, you pretty much already know who the members are, since the Icelandic scene is basically the same 10 guys in different combinations, but the bass player and especially the vocalist don't really play in anything else (the vocalist does guitars in Vonlaus, but it's not vocals so it doesn't count, and you have to understand just how important the vocals are for 〇). And Null & Void was just that fantastic to build upon both the popularity of the Icelandic scene at the time and mystique that their release created. And something about it felt like a one-off thing, so you can imagine my surprise when Entity came around.

With a lot of the Icelandic bands that spawned in the same period, their debut would bevery Deathspell Omega inspired and the follow-up that would take a lot of time would be more melodic. 〇 don't really come from the same mold, though they still follow the two-albums-a-long-time-apart rule. But Entity is cut from the same cloth as Null & Void, except you can tell that the band had six years to grow, but the despair they once felt is still there. You see, 〇 play a blend of depressive black metal and doom metal. Which would be enough to set them apart from the rest of the scene on its own, and is also the reason why I put so much emphasis on S.S.' vocals. The album is emotionally draining all by itself, but the vocals add so much more to how vulnerable it sounds. Like most DSBM, there are plenty of moments that are indeed over the top and you can feel S.S. not really being able to hold the right note, but somehow it never feels anything other than genuine, because even when a scream really hits it, you can tell that it feels authentic, and the same can be said about the cleaner wailing moments.

The band seem to have also worked out the normal song formula instead of just focusing on one 30-minutes-long behemoth, though it's not like the songs on Entity are that much shorter, with all of them in the 5-9 minute range. Though no longer part of the same song, the songs still flow quite nicely and this also clearly freed up the band from having to work out an extra batch of transitions between sections. Instead, the focus is on fleshing out each of the songs, and you can clearly hear the sound being much tighter this time around both performance- and production-wise. What the album loses in rawness it makes up for in genuine emotional baggage and resonant sections. So it's pretty much an improvement on all fronts.

And out of all Icelandic black metal bands, if even 〇 can come out with a sophomore, there's no excuse for Wormlust. The Skáphe collab doesn't count.