This is the third album from Danish black metal band Sunken.
Since experiencing Sunken live at 2024’s Fortress Festival, I have been eagerly awaiting a new record from them. Now, it’s here – the 47-minute Lykke. Featuring 4 sprawling atmospheric black metal songs, Sunken have produced an album that’s extremely effective at what it does.
These four songs are steeped in sorrow and despair. It’s atmospheric black metal, informed by the Cascadian style, but comes to us via a mixture of depressive black metal’s anguished darkness and an epic melancholic streak that’s powerful and affecting.
Lykke is a record that brings together concentrated fury and expansive space. These are frequently delivered together, but they’re also sometimes separated, providing poignant breathing spaces for the listener to dwell in amidst the fiery black metal. However, whether it’s unleashing dejected violence or portraying becalmed stillness, the music is always driven by emotion. It’s a very well-rendered collection of songs, and although the album primarily consists of shaded hues of twilight darkness, hope remains in the darkened places, ready to be discovered by those with patience and the will to explore.
Lykke is saturated in emotive depth. It’s rich in feeling, with haunting melodies and textured strings. It has an articulate heart, complemented by blackened aggression that serves the overall captivating arc of the music. It’s intense, but tempered by a skilled songwriting ability that manages to forge mood-focused worldbuilding remarkably well. Lykke boasts an evocative resonance that recalls the best of the atmospheric style, while retaining an identity that belongs to Sunken alone.
Sunken’s music is hypnotic and immersive. Listening to it I’m completely absorbed in their world, a reality that encompasses everything around me, seen and unseen. It’s a journey into an introspective heart of darkness that’s somehow so wide-ranging that everything else ceases to exist without it. Lykke is a superlative achievement, an expression of supreme black metal art. It is powered by an emotional substance that fuels the music to ever greater heights of potency, culminating in the exceptionally strong finale of Når Livet går på Hæld.
Essential listening.
Wonderbox Metal 