The man could not see through the wall of smoke. He was engulfed in something that made him blind to the blue skies overhead, and his children's toys sprawled across the yard, which he occasionally tripped upon. He did not understand how it had got to this point or where it had started. HADERACH formed in 2019 in Toronto, Ontario. Their most recent album "Cult of Personality" takes one through a fiction based, sci-fi adventure of doom and stoner metal.  Although the album is an EP, and in this regard, short, it takes one into an outer-body dimension through a blur of layered abstractness.

The first track, "Space Crusade," begins with Peter Stele-type vocal strategies, bringing to the forefront atmospherically based space noises, and low base tones. I imagined what a spinning disc looks like while floating in a whirlwind. It is descriptive and styled in a way that is soothing, yet provokes some sort of nervous tendencies as the song presses on. The man cannot breathe and he understands his children are also lost in the smoke. There is no sense of how he got there, or where the smoke came from, just that it is there. The air smells like pines and he is crushing the toys underneath him. "Vision from Within" starts on an enthusiastic note, with emphasis on an ancestral nature. Parts of the piece mimic traditional doom metal, but it is quite alternative. Clean vocals are drowned out by the strength of the instruments.

I felt as if the album created an odd mixture between doom metal and other types of music that are not of the metal genre. Nevertheless, the song carries a spooky and unsettling perspective of a futuristic world where ambince rests on synths and ear-splitting annoyances. The man bumps into his youngest son and scoops him up in his feeble arms. Perhaps the smoke is making the man delirious. "Ghost of the Desert" incorporates a Japanese folkish melody with the doom of stoner metal. In almost a pop-into-doom-metal fashion, the song is catchy and focuses on a set of key notes which are carried throughout the track. The final track keeps the ambience of the previous tracks, but adds in a different notion of rhythm that differs greatly from the last. The man had been walking for what felt like miles to find at least one of his children. The son and his father move throughout the front lawn of their house, hoping to find his two daughters and his eldest son. But the young people were nowhere to be found. The father's calls bounced against the wall of dust, and the toys kept appearing infinitely across the yard. The man did not remember purchasing this many toys for his children. Suddenly, the smoke dissipates, and he sees that his family disappears with the cloud, leaving the man with his youngest son. The son was sleeping in his arms, while his father clutched him tight.

"Cult of Personality" creates a landscape of design that is experimentally futuristic and technologically explorative. The album had some faults in its production style, for example, some parts sounding off tune or unpleasant to the ear. If this was done on purpose, as in to create a diverse medium, it was not clear to me. Nevertheless, the album was a myriad of complex and strange blended layers of a parallel universe that remains quite different from our own.