Hailing from Poland, comes new band HAUNTOLOGIST. Deeply rooted in negative metal music, it leans toward other genres and forms of expression to seek analogue musical sounds of sleepless nights and surreal, anxiety-provoking hallucinations. This is the band’s debut album, and it has eight songs.”Ozymandian” is first. Out of the gates, comes a harrowing and hasty sound that crawls up your neck slowly. Layers are added along the way, thickening up the sound. The frightening song is balanced with just enough melody to keep it mysterious and intriguing.

 “Golem” is next. It has a slower sound that is as depressing and pitiful as its namesake. We all know the story…tortured and poisoned by the one ring for over 500 years, Golem became a very important part of the fellowship’s quest to destroy the ring. “Waves of Concrete” is a much shorter song, with some melody tones that are dreamy, but tempered with thick bass notes. The bass acts as the nefarious older brother lurking in the background. “Deathdreamer” has intelligent and Progressive elements mixed into the music, and it displays the band’s thoughtful musicianship. “Hollow” has clean guitars and vocals and the title of the song is reflected in the music. That empty feeling…that incomplete feeling…that frustrating feeling of not being able to feel anything, if that makes sense.

 “Autonomy” is another slow song that combines the best of harsh, weighted elements, and desperate, hopeless ones. For me, it’s akin to living a simple but lonely life in what is left of the American frontier. “Gardermoen” has an almost jovial and bouncy beat mostly from the drum rhythm, and the clean vocals are depressing. I get a vibe from THE CURE here. As the song opens up, it seems to stretch on for miles. “Car Krukow” closes the album, back again with more dreamy and hopeless vibes. The spoken words are given without emotion, delivered like a plate of plain food to the listener.

 Much of the guitar work on the album is responsible for the dreamy but frightening and at times completely hopeless feeling that stays with the listener throughout the album, and the sound is as bleak as the album cover. This is an album that will force you to confront things that you thought were buried for good. The fear of the unknown is one of the most powerful fears the human psyche can face.