This Is Black Metal Webzine has chosen Tarask’s “Sitra Ahra” for a back-to-back review. Read the following reviews by two of our team members and enjoy!
Tarask – Sitra Ahra
Record Label: Antiq Records
Year: 2026
This Is Black Metal Rating: 8/10
Review by Rick Eaglestone
There are certainties in the world of underground Black Metal — isolation, atmosphere, and the unwavering conviction of those who carve their art entirely alone. Throw on Pharus Morti, Tarask’s debut, and the fingerprints are instantly recognisable: a project of absolute creative sovereignty, channelling Lovecraftian dread through a protagonist drowning in the rot of a corrupted industrial city. It is there from the first note — in droves — and it makes no effort to conceal itself. Why should it? It is literally the lifeblood of this music. And so too its architect: the solitary French visionary behind Tarask, who like a quietly devastating force operating just outside the periphery of mainstream Metal, has constructed one of the most compelling sequential narratives the Black Metal underground has produced in years.
Sitra Ahra — meaning ‘the other side’ in Kabbalistic tradition — is Tarask’s second full-length, and it picks up precisely where Pharus Morti concluded. The protagonist, having barely survived the cursed city’s grasp, finds himself expelled from it — broken, corrupted, and irreparably alone. The city succeeded in its absorption. Now, stripped of everything, the descent turns inward. What follows across six tracks — each simply titled Evocation — is less an album in the conventional sense and more a sequence of rites, each one pulling the listener further into something that cannot be shaken off. It is black metal as ceremony, and it is utterly devastating in every measure.
Released April 7th, 2026, through Antiq Records, Sitra Ahra arrives as one of those records that demands total surrender. This is not music designed for background consumption — it is music built to consume you in return. The thematic bones are formidable: a critique of conformity, consumerism, and the spiritual wreckage of modern life forms the backdrop, but Tarask’s real preoccupation is the interior collapse of a man with nothing left to hold onto. The turn toward the occult in the album’s final stages is the last available rope — not liberation but necessity. The more you listen to this album, the more you get from it. I’ve gone to bed thinking of it and woken up wanting to play it again, which for a Black Metal record of this density, is as powerful an endorsement as I can give.
Tarask
The album opens not with a warning shot but with a detonation. Evocation I establishes immediately that Sitra Ahra is an album of enormous intent and unflinching purpose — a storm front arriving without so much as a moment’s hesitation. The riff structure is labyrinthine, the production cavernous, and from the very first thirty seconds, you understand that this material is operating on an entirely different level. It is the track that announces itself and what is to follow and does so with the full weight of that responsibility on its shoulders. Full of intent and absolutely plentiful in atmosphere, it is a ferocious and compelling opening statement.
Where the opener established dominance through sheer force, Evocation II turns the screw through texture and tension. This is the first head-turning moment of the record — such an earworm in its melodic construction, burrowing beneath the surface with the kind of persistent, almost insidious quality that characterises the very best underground Black Metal. The track feels purposeful and personal, as though every riff is being drawn from somewhere genuine rather than simply assembled for effect. It is sharp, ferocious, and yet never without that emotional thread that gives Tarask its profound and lasting resonance.
If Evocation III were a restaurant, I would be throwing Michelin stars at it. The songwriting and structural architecture here is the album’s first real hint at genuine reflection — the compositional content begins to pull inward, and the tones and riff structures that emerge feel like an incredibly personal confession rendered in distortion and blast beats. It is also the point where the record begins to feel genuinely autobiographical, where the protagonist’s disintegration stops feeling conceptual and starts feeling devastatingly real. This section of the album, if it were a gateway into Tarask’s world for a new listener, would not be a bad place to start.
And then everything shifts. Evocation IV is the album’s great pivot — a passage of bare-boned acoustic guitar and hushed female vocals that settle over the record like smoke over still water. The voices feel adrift, reaching back toward a world the protagonist can no longer access. It is a rare and genuinely brave moment of fragility from a release that has dealt almost exclusively in ferocity and weight. The contrast works because both extremes are committed to with total conviction — this centrepiece stands as the kind of thing that stays with you long after the needle lifts. Quiet, disarming, and deeply haunting, it is the album’s most unexpected and perhaps most powerful passage.
The calm of Evocation IV makes what follows all the more punishing. Evocation V hauls everything back into the dark with unapologetic ferocity — as though the respite was a trap you walked straight into. This is quintessential Tarask: the kind of track that grabs you by the collar and refuses to let go. It carries the weight of the album’s closing sequence with unflinching purpose, managing to keep its fire and its freshness simultaneously, which for black metal of this density is no small achievement. There is certainly a formula at work here — but it is one wielded with total conviction.
And then there is Evocation VI. It fires through as the album’s closing statement and the gravity of what you are hearing hits you like a sledgehammer. This is where the protagonist’s surrender to the occult becomes irrevocable, where the two-album narrative locks shut with devastating coherence. For die-hard listeners, the emotional weight is considerable — but the alternative reading is not despair but completion. Tarask has told this story exactly as it needed to be told, and this is where it ends: on its own terms, without apology, and without compromise. That is as it should be.
Sitra Ahra makes certain there is no longer any room for doubt about where Tarask sits in the contemporary Black Metal conversation. Six evocations, six distinct emotional registers, and a narrative architecture of such coherence and ambition that it puts the vast majority of full-length records to shame. This is music built with total purpose, and it rewards every ounce of attention you give it. The underground is already taking notice. It is time the wider world followed. Do not miss it.
Rating: 9/10
Review by Jeger
If you spend enough time in one city, it becomes a living entity; one that envelops and ensnares you… Owns you! And it’s upon and throughout these wicked urban avenues where you’re forced to measure the true breadth of Human depravity. To partake would mean the death of purity and that little piece inside you that still holds on to what is sacred. So, you watch with disgusted eyes. You must escape this cursed Gomorrah! And seek sanctuary in something or somewhere meaningful. Prepare to leave your sanity on the table in turn for Lovecraftian horrors… Such was the concept behind Tarask’s debut LP, “Pharus Morti…”.
Tarask is a French Black Metal duo who formed upon the darkest year of 2020 and have since released two LPs, the aforementioned “Pharus Morti…”, along with a brand new full-length, “Sitra Ahra”, that was released on April 7 via Antiq. In the world of Occultism, “Sitra Ahra” is an impure spiritual realm, whereas here, it’s referring to modern Society, mass-consumerism and conformity. The story continues, as our protagonist escapes the Industrial Port; mad as a Hatter and searching for answers. So, he turns to the Occult and Satanism as a way to purify his essence. Musically, if it’s the early ‘90’s throwback you’re in for then prepare for disappointment. “Sitra Ahra” is contemporary BM through and through: intense, urgent and bewilderingly intricate. But mainly, “Sitra Ahra” is – as lame as it may sound – a journey of a record. There’s very little to prepare you for such unexpected shifts in tempo, such dense, imposing percussive tones and such dramatic shifts in mood, from enraged one moment in tracks like the aggressive opener, “Evocation I”, and melancholy the next, as you take in the somber tones of “Evocation III”. That feeling of anticipation for the next passage is replaced by dread just before the tempo picks back up and Earth-moving double-bass currents ensue.
Tarask
Throughout “Sitra Ahra”, you’ll experience flashes of both symphony and Choir, but aside from those, this record is like smooth black carbon fiber; a weapon of an album that’s been engineered for functionality and range, as opposed to shock and awe. All phases as air-tight as a coffin, precision being the name of the game. That is until things get all abstract and artsy during “Evocation IV”. Beatnik-like tinkering about their instruments as disjointed female cleans create a bordering-on-awkward experience. But it’s not long before Tarask get back to the business at hand – cold-crushing modern Black Metal that pounds, scrapes, digs and churns. I’m not a big fan of the overall tonality or production quality of the material. Everything is condensed and suffocating to the point of anxiety like being buried alive. That’s probably exactly what they were going for!
A Lovecraftian Dystopia, the threat of madness, the relinquishing of self over to the madness, self-discovery through the Occult/Satanism and finally blessed gnosis. My hopes for this album were high. I was hoping it would live up to the cover art… For the most part, “Sitra Ahra” does, but there are also those moments that just leave you kind of scratching your head. There are awkward parts peppered in scarcely that just don’t sound good. But then there are those divine parts that send you soaring upon melody’s wing and those epic parts that evoke images of this quasi-futuristic industrial burg at night. All wrapped in that aforementioned gorgeous cover art done by France’s Sözö Tözö. The good and the bad weigh about the same; offsetting into one valiant but altogether mediocre Black Metal album.
Rating: 7/10