SIGH Shiki CD

Japan has been quietly doing whatever it wants in extreme metal for decades, and nobody does it weirder or more brilliantly than Sigh. Shiki, their 2022 full-length, is the sound of a band that has absorbed black metal, jazz, psychedelia, and Japanese classical tradition and then set the whole thing on fire.

This is avant-garde black metal in the truest sense, not the kind where someone adds a keyboard and calls it experimental. Sigh have always existed outside genre logic, and Shiki sits comfortably in the lineage of Imaginary Sonicscape and Scenes From Hell, dense, cinematic, and genuinely strange in the best possible way. Essential listening for anyone who thinks the underground still has places to go.

Format: CD. Full length album. Released 2022. Country of origin: Japan. Genre: avant-garde black metal.

Fans of: Solefald, Ihsahn, Blut Aus Nord, Manes.