Band:	Gaerea
Album:	Coma
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	October 25, 2024
A review by:	musclassia

01. The Poet's Ballet
02. Hope Shatters
03. Suspended
04. World Ablaze
05. Coma
06. Wilted Flower
07. Reborn
08. Shapeshifter
09. Unknown
10. Kingdom Of Thorns

With first Swallow The Sun and now Gaerea, late October seems to be the time for established bands to undertake a bold new direction that may redefine perspectives of said groups. Coma is a somewhat radical next step for a band that have quickly established themselves as rising stars in black metal.

Even on debut album Unsettling Whispers, the Portuguese group weren’t a trve kvlt black metal band, but sophomore release Limbo really made evident their greater ambitions, containing a number of long songs that featured full-fledged explorations of post-metal alongside the pre-existing blackened core to their style. Mirage arguably placed yet more of an emphasis on the melodic and post- elements of their sound, but even with that trajectory already established, Coma takes things further than a lot of people likely would have anticipated.

Although blasting drums, guitars with a heavy preference for tremolos, and shrieking vocals (courtesy of Guilherme Henriques for the first time, having swapped from guitar duties in late 2022) are all still at the core of this album’s sound, it no longer feels all that accurate to simply refer to Coma as a black metal album. The riffing not only has a consistently melodic black slant (as exemplified on the likes of “Suspended” and “Reborn”), but often veers towards blackgaze territory (see “Wilted Flower” and “Kingdom Of Thorns”). Even the tracks that initially sound darker and more fierce, such as “Hope Shatters” and the title track, ultimately work their way towards lighter or more melodic climaxes.

Just as the harsher black metal has been toned down from previous outings, so too arguably has the band’s post-metal usage, at least partly due to the shorter track lengths (averaging around the 5-minute mark). That’s not to say that dynamics and builds are absent – the opening to “Suspended” makes very clear that this isn’t the case – but the relevant sections feel shorter, more oriented towards post-rock/blackgaze tranquillity, and in several instances, the mid-song breaks are brief enough to effectively just be pauses.

In place of these de-emphasized sounds, a few surprises can be heard. “World Ablaze” is particularly attention-grabbing in how its drum parts and anthemic hooks genuinely approach post-hardcore territory. In a similar vein, some of the arpeggiated guitar melodicism in “Unknown” gives real Killswitch Engage/Times Of Grace vibes. I certainly wouldn’t say that Gaerea are threatening to become a [pick your prefix of choice]-core by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s intriguing to hear these unexpected cues. While these particular tracks don’t further feed into the metalcore feel with clean vocal choruses, there are clean vocals of a few different varieties across the record, from the choral lines in the background giving an extra epicness to the climax of “Suspended” or the whispered spoken word midway into “Wilted Flower”, through to the genuine understated clean singing heard at the ending of this latter track or in a few other places elsewhere on the record.

Gaerea are throwing a lot into Coma, and much of it pays off. After the prolonged gentle scene-setting introduction to “The Poet’s Ballet”, the eventual blackgaze-leaning explosion of sound is vey pleasantly uplifting in spite of the heavy blast beat use, while “Suspended” finds synchrony between intense meloblack, post-rock tweeness and atmo-black grandeur. The major stylistic leaps of faith in “World Ablaze” and “Unknown” work out very well, as does the really major lean into delicacy with “Wilted Flower”.

With that all said, it’s not an album without flaws. The songs overall have a heightened memorability compared to the last couple of albums due to the prioritization of melody and hookiness, but the way in which this is mainly delivered through blast-accompanied tremolo does mean some of it begins to blend together towards the end of the tracklist, and “Reborn” is unfortunately a song that struggles to stand out in any meaningful way when set against the more diverse tracks surrounding it. A bigger issue for me is the over-reliance on mid-song pauses that don’t always feel necessary; the title track is one of the first songs to do it, but almost every track after it has some kind of moment like this, and particularly in “Shapeshifter” and “Unknown”, it feels distracting and overindulgent (the moment is saved a bit in the latter by the impact and tonality of the passage that follows immediately after).

Overall, though, I feel that Coma is a successful entry into the Gaerea discography, and one that opens up a lot of doors that the band could explore going forward from it. While a portion of older fans may struggle to fully get on board with this new direction, I imagine most people will be able to embrace it, and it may turn some new audiences onto the band as well.