Band:	Hope Drone
Album:	Void Lustre
Style:	Atmospheric black metal, Post-metal
Release date:	August 30, 2019
A review by:	RaduP

01. Being Into Nothingness
02. Forged By The Tide
03. In Floods & Depths
04. This Body Will Be Ash
05. In Shifting Light

What a cool fucking band name is "Hope Drone"! Let's see if their music lives up to it!

I'll admit that I added this album to my review queue solely due to the band name. Also the album titles sounded cool too and they were signed to Relapse Records so there had to be some substance to it. This is the band's second album, so there wasn't a lot of back catalog listening for me to do before the album dropped. Or so I thought, before I realized that their debut full length is almost 80 minutes long and even their EP goes well over 30 minutes. So already enough to make Void Lustre feel like a band's fourth album. Thankfully, Void Lustre cuts a bit of that fat, having just a bit over an hour in runtime.

Although it is not unusual for such atmosphere-focused music as post-black metal to get into such long runtimes, especially if the band even has "Drone" in its name, I still prefer that they keep me engaged for most of it rather than making me prefer it as background music. Despite having a shorter length than its predecessor, Void Lustre still feels like it's stretching a bit too thin and it would've hit a lot harder with a further 15 minutes cut from it. This doesn't mean that the listener should be discouraged to dive into the album, as it still makes that hour full of worthwhile music. With the length issue out of the way, let's talk about the music itself.

As stated, Hope Drone play atmospheric post-black metal, ticking some similarities to bands like Downfall Of Gaia, Altar Of Plagues or Tombs. The post-metal influence is obviously strong, especially in the guitar leads and the vocals, but there's blast beats galore to take back to the black metal core. The suffocating atmosphere is still key, as is the slightly droney slow building of it, which is to be expected when all but one song go over the ten minutes mark. With each of the songs feeling like behemoths of despair that each feels rewarding, they do little too little to stand out from one another, and to ensure that the album as a whole feels multidimensional. And when I listen to such a tight and well-produced (seriously, the production on this thing is fantastic) and well-performed atmosphere-focused album, I don't want to feel that I'd be better off listening to each track separately instead of the album as a whole.

Hope Drone are still leagues ahead of most of their contemporaries, they craft great immersive songs and I wouldn't have bothered to call their album too long with too little substance if I didn't feel like they had it in them to give their next project more substance and make it feel even more worthwhile. For what it's worth, Void Lustre is a much better album than Cloak Of Ash, which itself was a terrific album despite its flaws. The flaws are still there, and yet Void Lustre is on the right track, great in its own right besides hopefully being a stepping stone for an even better follow-up.