What Remains When Hope Has Failed

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  NEMOROUS
• Duration: 00:43:02
• Available from: 12/19/2025
• Label:

• Bindrune Recordings

Streaming not yet available

In this 2025 which is now coming to an end, comes the long-distance debut of the English Nemorous.
After a self-titled EP in 2021 and some ongoing line-up reshuffles, the group presents itself today as a sextet; “What Remains When Hope Fails” is released under the aegis of Bindrune Recordings, and brings with it the characteristics of a well-made atmospheric black metal: five long songs and a short interlude (“Bereft, Part 2”) in which sometimes absorbed and sometimes tempestuous guitars splash on articulated rhythmic patterns, with the keyboards illuminating the points of light like frost on winter scenarios (the solo at the end of the final title-track), the abrasive and harsh voice making the extreme parts even more sharp, with some almost spoken parts (“The Rotten Bough”) enriching the entire work with spleen suggestions – a particular state of mind that is actually very present in the personality of the British in question.

Our band's ability to translate into music brushstrokes of leaden, absorbed landscapes, tinged with the colors of autumn or streaked by the first claws of winter, proves particularly effective in episodes like “Sky Avalanche”, full of a melancholy epic quality that looks both at home (with Winterfylleth) and overseas (impossible to ignore, in this case too, the legacy of Agalloch, or what Wolves In The Throne Room has written over the course of their career), with scream and growl to flank painful and reflective notes even in the blackest parts, or the subsequent “Quiescence”, in which the very tense parts mix with more suspended and absorbed moments, in which above all certain guitar arpeggios do the talking.
This game of chiaroscuro, also well represented by the cover, in which nature, decay and death meet in a perfect play of light and shadow that only certain forests can reproduce, is always in balance between proud rides and introspection, without either of the two appearing preponderant over the other.

Of course, after a few listens a certain underlying 'staticity' creeps in, perhaps due to a slight monotony of the solutions adopted (in which perhaps a pinch of imagination is missing to give a bold jolt to what is being played), to slightly tarnish a debut that is nevertheless very good, still capable of transmitting those twilight and forest sensations that only certain black metal is capable of giving. We believe that, with a slight adjustment in the dynamism of both the individual songs and the entire work, Nemorous have all it takes to become excellent standard-bearers of the genre.
We recommend “What Remains When Hope Has Failed” to those who are never tired of these sounds, to accompany the last days of the year.