Having only formed in 2022, one-man Spanish act A Lapse Of Solitude (established by sole member Santiago Joaquín González) have already released their full-length debut Aeon in 2023, and in some style. By using an intriguing range of sounds, ranging from post-black and atmospheric black, to shoegaze and blackgaze, A Lapse Of Solitude provide deeply atmospheric soundscapes and emotive songwriting, which exhaust all listeners' negative emotions and uplift one's mind and spirit.

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Abandoned is probably one of the most soothing metal albums you'll listen to and oddly enough Among The Lights comes from a country mostly known for their black metal, namely Poland. But fret not because they're keeping with their Polish black metal heritage, filling the album to the brim with the most beautiful clean tremolo-picking you'll ever come across. On top of that there's some exquisite synth and guitar melodies that enhance the already dreamy atmosphere whenever present. The vocals are fleeting, almost angelic at times and as smooth as silk gently caressing your ears. You won't find growls here except for the title track, which still ends with chanting voices that turn softer as the song progresses. So just close your eyes and dream away while Among The Lights take you with them to the heavens.

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One of this year's weirdest turns was the sudden opportunity to talk about Nothing on a metal website. While still not able to have a profile by themselves, they teamed up with one of metal's most prolific collaborators in one of the most baffling collaboration premise: a grindcore band and a shoegaze band. It's not the only collaborative album that Full Of Hell have participated in this year, but despite the sheer oddity of this collab compared to the sound-wise closer sludge of Primitive Man, When No Birds Sang finds common ground in Nothing's light and often quite minimalist shoegaze (albeit denser, louder, and heavier), with the occasional burst of heaviness more often in the form of something sludgy rather than anything resembling grindcore proper, with the album's heaviest moments coming right as it starts and gradually mellowing.

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Metalgaze sometimes seems like a catch-all phrase for "bright black metal", which may or may not have any actual "shoegaze" involved. That's fair, because as far as bright black metal goes, few bands sound as bright as Great Cold Emptiness sounds here. With the funeral doom side of their sound immensely diminished this time around, what's left is hyper-friendly and hyper-melodic with an almost cinematic take on how dynamic the atmosphere is. Conceptually tied to growth and friendship, there's some unique emotional appeal here that makes Immaculate Hearts Will Triumph feel even more personal, more nostalgic, more filled with dread and hope and feeling everything ever very strongly.

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Ashes Of The World Tree plays for impact rather than duration: it shows up, finds a way to cover oceans and skies and mountains in a few short minutes each, and then leaves you to your own self-reflection. Judicious synthesizer placement and periodic addition of violin coax out a lot of color in otherwise fairly simple shoegaze blueprints, and yet it’s not so totally polished that all of the edges of the black metal wear away; Hwaino’s delivery is just a bit messy, a little lower-fidelity than your typical post-black/metalgaze albums tend to be, and the result is that much more genuine in its expressions.

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A late-year surprise if there ever were any, Shedfromthebody's Amare arrived on the second-to-last release Friday of the year and instantly ordered some rearrangements of metalgaze lists all around. The one-woman band approaches metalgaze more from a doom metal angle, with gloomy and colossal riffs that sound even more massive and fuzzier than when we last left off with Shedfromthebody. The shoegaze side is supplemented by a lot of ethereal wave, leaving the otherworldly soft vocals to be a definite highlight, weaving exceptionally well with the harsher vocals in the one song that has a guest vocalist. All of it comes together to create some of the most enchanting metal since Chelsea Wolfe's Hiss Spun.

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Erech Leleth seems to embrace contradictions. Whichever of his projects (e.g. Ancient Mastery, Narzissus, Carathis) you scrutinize, it's rarely just pure black metal; rather, it's typically a conglomerate of various influences that shouldn't fit together. The union of the aggressive and dark atmosphere of black metal with the dreamy, atmospheric soundscapes of shoegaze thrives on the dynamic of opposites, that's why it comes as no surprise that Erech eventually ventured into blackgaze. However, blackgaze is just the broad musical framework within which Erech operates on Summer Haze '99's debut album. The foundation of raw black metal and post-rock is regularly and vigorously punctuated by such atypical elements that it's actually a miracle that the combination of dream pop, melodic hardcore, indie rock, and black metal does not irreversibly collapse. So why does Inevitable sound not like immeasurable chaos, but quite the opposite? That's a good question, but one that can easily be answered by the artist's outstanding songwriting skills in reconciling the incompatible. And at the latest when guest singer Anouk Madrid's truly beautiful, jazz lounge-like voice emerges for the first time, Inevitable becomes so captivating that this question fades into such a distant sphere as if it were never posed.

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A lot of what's most appealing about metalgaze and its tangential neighboring genres is the emotional appeal of it. There's something quite striking about the light/dark and heavy/mellow contrast that is very specific to this genre that really can pull heartstrings. Tie that to some striking lyricism and you have an emotional gutpunch in music form. And that's something that Svalbard excel at. Blissful melodies and airy clean vocals merged with hardcore drumming and screamo vocals and a dash of post-metal create a pretty dynamic and immersive backdrop, but it's still the lyricism, which really doesn't beat around the bush and aims at the heart of feeling like absolute shit, even more specifically around imposter syndrome this time, that really makes this such an impactful listen. With a slightly more polished production, perhaps courtesy of their move to one of the biggest labels ever, The Weight Of The Mask is some of the sharpest emotional metal out there.

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There’s more out there than just shoegaze that can pull black metal’s low fidelity in a different direction: Vvilderness fill the gaps between infernos with folk, complimenting their blurry, effects-heavy atmospheres with acoustic interludes and an ensemble of traditional instrumentation. Even limiting themselves to the conventional trappings of metalgaze, Vvilderness can block out a musical theme and elevate it to massive emotional scales; adding in a whole bank of new sounds and influences turns Path into a much different beast from your standard “black metal but pedals and also sad” formula. Path wanders through valleys of melancholy quietude and peaks of majestic declarations, not exactly following the constant crescendo/decrescendo turned into a formula by many post-whatever bands but aiming for a complimentary balance between the introspective and explorative modes of their writing. The production is still abrasive, but the beauty is genuine.

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Ask & Embla, the debut of Thijs Mulders’ project Welmoed, has been five years in the making; to help finally render his vision a reality, Mulders has recruited his Misanthropia bandmates Bram Koller and Hugo De Waal on harsh vocals and drums respectively, but it is the third session musician, Veerle Kiliaan, who takes Ask & Embla to the next level. Her stirring, tender clean singing serves as a beautiful contrast to Koller’s screams and roars, just as the shimmering post-rock and tranquil orchestrations deftly complement the black metal that doubtless traces its lineage to Mulders & co’s Misanthropia days. The extremes of Ask & Embla, the evocative melody alongside the dark aggression, work in a harmony akin to that of the arboreal lovers on the gorgeous album cover.

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