Band:	Heretoir
Album:	Nightsphere
Style:	Blackgaze, Post-black metal
Release date:	October 2023

01. Sanctum - Nightsphere Part I
02. Twilight Of The Machines
03. Pneuma
04. Glacierheart - Nightsphere Part II
05. The Death Of Man

Of all the different metal genres, the ‘blackgaze’ or ‘metalgaze’ niche is one that I’m perhaps most neutral to; there’s usually one or two albums each year that stands out, but most of it is ‘good, not great’ content. One exception is The Circle, Heretoir’s stellar 2017 album; after 6 years waiting for the group to strike magic twice, have they pulled it off with Nightsphere?

A major reason as to why The Circle had such an effect on me is likely that it didn’t fall easily into the blackgaze niche, or indeed any niche; there were certainly genre elements on the record, but the writing had a much greater riff focus than most albums in the subgenre, and there was also quite a bit of darkness and heaviness to the writing, not to mention elements from different styles. I was therefore quite surprised when I first listened to Nightsphere; in contrast to its predecessor, it is far more easily categorizable into a single genre, specifically Alcest-style blackgaze/atmo-black. On initial impressions, I was somewhat disappointed that a band that had already established a distinctive style had effectively regressed towards something more generic; however, overlooking these expectations, how does Nightsphere stack up on its own merits?

Well, one complaint that a few people raised concerning The Circle, namely its 65-minute length, cannot be applied here; Heretoir’s new album clocks in at a far more digestible 42 minutes. However, there is a trade-off; The Circle was quite varied, in both style and tone, but Nightsphere feels far more singular, especially tonally. There are a couple of departures from the ‘core’ sound of the record, most notably the borderline ambient piano centrepiece “Pneuma” (which, at 7 minutes, takes up a considerable chunk of the album’s runtime) and the similarly ambient synth-laden closing track “The Death Of Man”. However, the three ‘main’ songs, which take up 30 minutes between them, share a lot in tone and style.

They’re not identical, though, and a comparison of the two “Nightsphere” songs demonstrates that; opener “Sanctum” has quite a lot of soft acoustic parts with clean vocals, while “Glacierheart” features the bulk of the record’s brief use of blast beats. “Sanctum” takes a long time to set the stage for the record before growing in relative intensity; it’s almost 3 minutes before gentle crooning and acoustic strumming are superseded by shrieked and more passionately orated clean vocals, sad guitar melodies and double bass-heavy drumming. A brief snippet of blasting aggression midway through shakes things up a bit, but the bulk of the song remains mostly subdued and sorrowful; in contrast, “Glacierheart” starts off with a livelier tempo (even if the same style of guitar leads, acoustic strumming and blackened undertones reappear), and dedicates more of its time to full-pelt intensity.

The duo make for a good 1-2 that comprises about half of Nightsphere, and while I’ve mentioned that the album is more heavily rooted in blackgaze than its predecessors, the liberal use of acoustic guitars, the tone of the guitar melodies and the delivery some of the vocals also imbue a bit of Agalloch’s The Mantle into these tracks. On balance, I would say that the songs are firmly above average for the genre; on the flip side, they do lack the full memorability and potent emotions that Heretoir captured frequently on The Circle, and the album’s remaining song, “Twilight Of The Machines”, is a tad too indebted to Alcest, even though its shimmering soundscapes are tranquil and resonant.

I’ve spent a lot of time when re-spinning this album trying to figure out whether my initial feelings of ‘regression’ on the part of Heretoir are unfair. After a fair few listens, I think two things can be true at the same time: Nightsphere is a well-made blackgaze/atmo-black album with a moving and consistent core tone in addition to well-written songs, and Heretoir have lost some of what made them a standout band. In both shifting towards a more overtly derivative sound, and underutilizing the range of emotions that they’ve demonstrated themselves capable of evoking, the band have produced something that is amiable, but falls short of their full potential.