Review: Empillarist – Pale River, Ghost Reflection

Review by Rick Eaglestone

Empillarist – Pale River, Ghost Reflection

Record Label: Massive Void Recordings

Year: 2025

Rating: 7/10

Chile’s Empillarist has conjured such a moment with Pale River, Ghost Reflection – a composition work that stands as a testament to the enduring power of Atmospheric/Depressive Black Metal.

From the opening notes, it becomes abundantly clear that is a communion with shadows, a pilgrimage through landscapes both internal and eternal, with a lo-fi texture that has become synonymous with the DSBM underground doesn’t mask the music but rather serves as its natural skin, weathered and scarred like the emotional terrain it maps.

Empillarist brings their own voice to this conversation with ghosts. The tremolo passages do not simply repeat; they evolve, breathing with organic urgency that suggests something alive moving beneath the surface of these compositions. Where lesser bands might rely on repetition as a crutch, here it becomes a mantra, each cycle revealing new depths of meaning.

Vocally, the approach is uncompromising. These are not performances but purges, raw emanations that feel torn from some primal place where language fails and only sound remains. The dynamics between whispered confessions and tortured screams create a topography of pain that feels genuinely cartographic, as if one could navigate by these emotional landmarks.

The pacing demonstrates a mature understanding of how atmosphere accumulates, how tension builds not through volume but through the accumulation of detail, layer upon layer of sonic sediment.

Empillarist

The production work deserves special mention – there is a clarity here that serves the compositions without sacrificing the essential rawness that makes DSBM effective. Every guitar layer finds its place in the mix, every vocal line cuts through without overwhelming, creating space where the music can breathe and the listener can breathe with it. It is professional without being sanitized, clear without losing the essential grit that gives this music its texture.

By album’s close, one feels genuinely transported – not to somewhere pleasant, necessarily, but somewhere necessary. Pale River, Ghost Reflection succeeds because it understands that the best Black Metal does not simply describe darkness; it becomes darkness, offering not escape but deeper entry into territories where healing happens through confrontation rather than avoidance.

Empillarist has created something genuinely cathartic here, a work that honours the genre’s capacity for transformation through negation. There is a romanticism in the rawness that is hard to pull away from

Highlight tracks: Black Roses, I Never Was Found.