Sea Mosquito – Majestas
Release Date: 1st August 2025
Label: I, Voidhanger Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Black Metal, Experimental Black Metal, Avant-Garde.
FFO: The Faceless, Ofnus, The Infernal Sea.
Review By: Ross Bowie
Majestas is the second album from London based black metallers, Sea Mosquito. The sophomore record is a 44-minute journey infused with Norwegian style black metal, spacey pads, chanted vocals and esoteric influences.
Sea Mosquito waste no time in getting the album started, Majestas kicks off without even really having an intro as you’re immediately hit with blasting drums, screeching vocals and a barrage of riffs. The riffs are blackened and dissonant yet furious and playing at breakneck speed, but this is more than just your standard black metal release. The band aren’t scared to on a whim catapult their songs into the ether and letting things become a bit more epic with the introduction of ambient pads, choirs and dialling up the atmosphere that surrounds the chaos.
Majestas lives up to its name—it feels both grand and mysterious. The music has a trippy, epic quality with a cold, dark core and an expansive, otherworldly vibe that makes it feel like a journey. But despite its spacey and emotional depth, there’s also a harshness to it. The six tracks have a sharp, unsettling side, hiding their meaning behind layers of dissonance and intensity. Sea Mosquito blends atmospheric, space-like sounds with aggressive melodies, delivering their songs in a complex, captivating way.
Sea Mosquito have levelled up from their previous work, by pushing every element of their sound further. Across the album’s six, they either start minimally before constantly expanding and growing, or immediately start on ten and roar out your speakers. Majestas follows a similar structure, with the most exciting parts of the songs coming in the middle and especially the band’s ability to create expansive and engaging outros. The middle sections open the songs up in a variety of different ways. Dead To The World has an acoustic passage which slowly ramps up the tension before exploding with the vocals taking a darker and more guttural approach, whereas the following track, Ascension’s bridge has an almost spoken word and shouted vocal melody that grabs your full intention as you cling on to every work vocalist Nunn screams at you. The band even wait till the dying moments of the album’s closer before utilising clean vocals that play nicely off the visceral screams and pounding drums.
The album succeeds in its ambitious goals, despite the production lacking behind the band’s ability. The drums lack that thickness that is present everywhere else on the album and become extremely noticeable when the band lean into the cleaner and more stripped back sections of the record, but even when blasting, the drums never sound natural and sound like they have been programmed on music software. There are moments where Majestas can feel thin, but then once the band dial up the ambience, the space is beautifully filled and expands all around your ear drum and sections effortlessly weave in and out.
This album isn’t just one-dimensional—it takes you on a layered, complex trip into the unknown. Each song brings something different to the table, blending elements like haunting atmosphere, prog-influenced sections, raw dissonance, and more. Whether it’s a solitary riff, emotional clean vocals in the background, strange melodies, or intense blast beats, Sea Mosquito knows exactly what they’re doing and has the creativity and ability to make it all work in a way that’s genuinely worth diving into.
(3.5 / 5)
