Wazzara Reveal New Album 'Arbor'

Arbor takes its title seriously. Wazzara's fourth release is structured around ideas of rootedness, buried memory and renewal, and its music repeatedly enacts those concepts rather than merely illustrating them. Riffs emerge slowly from dense textures, melodies are partially obscured before returning with greater force, and moments of apparent stillness carry the latent threat of another eruption. The album's seven tracks therefore operate less as discrete songs than as interconnected states.

The band's synthesis of atmospheric black metal, doom and blackgaze is most effective when those genres cease to be identifiable categories. “Hollow” possesses doom's gravitational pull but is shaped by the spaciousness of blackgaze; “Her Ashes Down The River” turns melancholy into something almost physical; “Oceans” expands the record's emotional geography further. These are compositions interested in scale, but also in the relationship between scale and vulnerability.

The production reinforces that conceptual unity. Andrei Jumuga, returning as drummer after his work on CYCLES, contributes a playing style that can move from restraint to violence without disrupting the album's broader architecture. Andy Roscyk's mixing preserves the distinction between the record's layers, while Martin Korth's mastering gives the whole thing considerable presence. The result is expansive without becoming formless.

Most revealing is “zessa (reborn),” whose existence complicates the album's relationship with time. A composition first released in 2019 has been altered by repeated performance and reintroduced as something neither entirely old nor entirely new. That is precisely what Arbor understands about artistic development: evolution does not necessarily mean abandoning one's roots. Sometimes it means returning to them and discovering that they have grown.