The opening moments are deceptive in their gentleness. A melody drifts in — spare, almost fragile — carrying the listener forward with the patience of someone who knows precisely how much weight is about to land. This is not a piece of music that announces itself with bravado. It is far more dangerous than that. Jurkiewicz understands something that many architects of the blackgaze and post-black metal world have forgotten, or perhaps never grasped: that the most punishing passages earn their violence only when they are preceded by genuine tenderness. The contrast here is not a stylistic trick. It is the emotional engine of the entire composition.
Because the track does, eventually, erupt. The saturation arrives like fog rolling off a cold body of water, and with it come the whispered vocals — intimate, almost confessional — before they fracture into something far rawler. The screams, when they come, are extraordinary. They do not simply *appear*; they seem to have been restrained behind a membrane of atmosphere, held back by design, so that when they finally break through, they carry the accumulated tension of everything that preceded them. It is a masterful piece of dynamic architecture, and it speaks to the depth of Jurkiewicz's compositional instinct that the violence never feels gratuitous. It feels *necessary*.
Musically, *In excitatione terrae* occupies a space where several traditions converge without any single one dominating. The blackgaze influence is unmistakable — those layers of shimmering, distorted guitar that blur the boundary between beauty and brutality — but there is a post-punk coldness to the rhythmic structures as well, a sense of mechanical precision beneath the waves of atmosphere. The blast beats, when they arrive, are ferocious, rendered incandescent by the sheer force of Jurkiewicz's drumming, yet they do not overwhelm the melodic architecture beneath them. They punctuate it. They *underline* it.
What is remarkable, and what separates this single from the vast majority of releases in this crowded corner of the heavy music landscape, is the emotional sincerity at its core. Jurkiewicz has spoken of Viamaer not as a band project but as a form of expression born from necessity — a channel for states of being that resist ordinary language. One hears this conviction in the music itself. *In excitatione terrae* does not perform emotion. It *discloses* it. The Polish lyrics, delivered in both whispered and agonised registers, carry an intimacy that transcends any language barrier; you need not understand a single word to feel the weight of what is being communicated. The Latin title, by contrast, opens the material outward, towards something more symbolic, more cosmological. The interplay between the two registers — the deeply personal and the abstractly mythic — gives the track a layered quality that rewards repeated listening.
The production deserves particular mention. Jurkiewicz handled the arrangement, composition, mixing, and mastering himself, and the results are striking. The space in this recording is extraordinary — vast, cold, carefully maintained. The silence between elements is as considered as the elements themselves. One is reminded, faintly, of the early work of projects like Wolves in the Throne Room or even the more atmospheric passages of Alcest, though Viamaer ultimately sounds like neither. This is its own thing: haunted, rigorous, and deeply felt.
*In excitatione terrae* is, ultimately, a single that does what the very best opening tracks have always done — it establishes a world, sets the emotional stakes, and leaves you desperate to know what comes next. From a debut project, this is not merely promising. It is, by any serious measure, an extraordinary first statement.
Viamaer's debut album In lumine lunae is available now.