Domhain – In Perfect Stillness
Release Date: 20th February 2026
Label: These Hands Melt
Bandcamp
Genre: Atmospheric Black Metal, Post-Black Metal.
FFO: Agalloch, Alcest, Saor, Primordial.
Review By: Magnus Rotås
Hailing from Belfast, Domhain‘s debut full-length In Perfect Stillness arrives as a stunning maturation of the atmospheric black metal / post-black sound they’ve been honing since their early EP days.
A lot of the reasons why Black metal as a genre has been so influential I think was because it managed to invoke a feeling of geographical identity purely through the music, the music sounded like the place it came from in many ways. And Domhain certainly captures this aspect of black metal in a bottle and weaves an emotional tapestry that feels intimately tied to the wild, storm-lashed landscapes and brooding coastlines of Northern Ireland.
However, the band doesn’t just consist of Irish lads, but also of Anaïs Chareyre-Méjan, which I believe is a French graphical artist – hence the amazing artwork for this record. She provides drums/clean vocals and paints delicate French strokes all over this album. This is never more apparent than on the song Footsteps II, which is a beautiful song, but it does sound an awful lot like Alcest – so much so that it stands a bit too much out against the other songs on the album.
One of the defining features of this album is that it contains a great deal of vocal harmonies and cello, which might not be the first thing you think of when you hear “black metal”, but it stands out as a great feature of the album and creates a very distinct identity to the tracks. The intro track in particular sounds like the opening to a dark souls game. The layered vocals—often blending Andy Ennis’s blackened rasps and screams with clean, haunting chants and harmonies from Anaïs in a battle between light and dark. These vocal harmonies create several epic moments on the album that feels like grandiose set-pieces, like at the end of the title track, which ends with this repeated riff and the album’s most emotional soul-crushing vocals that keep building in intensity. It’s a shame this is second last in the track listing, since this would have been the absolute perfect closing track to this album.
If I were to pick out my favorite thing about this album however, it’s the band ability at carving out stark, lonely melodies amid the post-black drive – like a few minutes into Talamh Lom where the song slows down into this really nice little quiet section, it just has so much atmosphere to it. It’s these melodic, textural, and emotional keystones that make the album’s quieter interludes as gripping as its blasts. The songwriting across the board is phenomenal. They really know how to write long form songs with different movements to them.
In Perfect Stillness is a great full-length debut from a band I am sure has plenty more to give, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few years from now they release an album that can climb even closer to the summit of a perfect score. They are so close to a 4.5 star already with this impressive release.
(4 / 5)
