Track By Tracks: VACUA - Mater (2025)

1. Falce dei Reietti:

The record opens with the voice of a Janara, a witch from Southern Italian folklore—a figure both feared and persecuted, yet deeply bound to the Earth. Her chant is not merely personal vengeance, but an echo of Nature Itself, reclaiming justice through those cast aside. The imagery of blood, prey, and nocturnal skies becomes a ritual of balance restored, where the outcast embodies the fury of a wounded planet. Musically, the track unfolds as a melodic black metal surge, its sharpened riffs carrying both clarity and menace. The doom-tinged outro feels like the slow swing of the scythe itself, lowering with inevitable weight. Originally released in rawer form on the band’s debut EP, here it finds its definitive incarnation: both haunting and commanding, a fitting invocation to the themes that follow.

2. Dies Funeris Terrae:

Where “Falce dei Reietti” is intimate in its mythic vengeance, “Dies Funeris Terrae” expands the stage to the scale of apocalypse. Bells toll with both festivity and mourning, mocking humanity’s downfall as locusts, flames, and trumpets herald the end. The Earth does not weep—It grins, watching men fall under the weight of their own arrogance. Fast-paced yet richly melodic, the track captures the paradox of beauty and ruin entwined, as though even in annihilation, Mother Earth stages a cruelly magnificent finale.

3. Dissolto:

Here, the language turns alchemical: dew, blood, crystal, and skin form the vocabulary of a ritual dance. The black metal whirls in hypnotic patterns, echoing possession and transformation. Humanity dissolves not in silence, but in rhythm—extinguished by the same hands that once caressed. The “dissolution” is not just death, but an unmasking: what vanishes is what never truly belonged.

4. Agoraphobia:

The violence now collapses inward. If the Earth is destroyed on a cosmic scale, here the mind itself becomes its own cage. Numbers, solitude, and blindness weigh as heavily as locusts and fire. The music sharpens into something rawer, almost punk in its directness, an aggressive dance that strips away ornament until only the void remains. Lyrically, the isolation mirrors the same fracture: man unable to belong, severed from his origin, condemned to solitude in both body and spirit.

5. Interlude:

This brief passage works like a liminal space—an inward tunnel where the collapse gathers breath. It does not soothe, but prepares, a pause before the plunge. In the architecture of the record, it becomes the moment where inevitability sinks in: there is no way back, only the continuation of decline.

6. Rantoli nel Buio:

A suffocating descent into breathlessness. The lungs choke on sand, fireflies dim, shame turns into a black hole. “Rantoli nel Buio” embodies the pessimism of a dying body and a dying planet, each gasp mirrored in distorted riffs that crawl rather than soar. The repetition of rattles and prejudices suggests that decline is not only biological but social: mankind dragging itself down with the very constructs it worshipped.

7. Trasmigrazione:

The passage to the other side. Here, synths emerge—the only track where they appear—lending a spectral atmosphere to a composition that leans toward post-black expansiveness. The soul cries, blood runs as rivers and lakes, and Charon is invoked as guide. Yet the ferryman does not only carry individuals—he ferries an entire species, an entire epoch, toward its father, its origin. Suffering is the path and the price, but also the compass. Gratitude toward pain reads almost sacramental, as if only through torment can humanity return to its source.

8. Aura Glaciale:

The end arrives in frost. A galloping finale propels the listener forward, only to be cut short by a sudden cesura—silence as absolute as ice. Here, the curse is laid upon ancestors and destinies, but what survives is not rage, nor redemption: only a desert of cold. The uncorrupted freeze becomes both exaltation and obliteration, the final gesture of a Mother Earth who, in destroying Herself, drags humanity into Her immaculate stillness. It is a conclusion without catharsis—pure desolation, unyielding.