It was but April 2020 when WHITE NIGHTS revealed their bolt-from-the-blue debut EP, Into the Lap of the Ancient Mother, for IRON BONEHEAD. Adorned with eye-gougingly colorful cover artwork, WHITE NIGHTS’ four-song public debut indeed conveyed a very strange and very malformed world: warped, literally sun-damaged dirges of abstract black metal deviated further by undertones of shimmering deathrock, the whole headfuck lysergic as it was languorous.
Wasting no time in wasting the listener’s last threads of sanity, WHITE NIGHTS deliver a new warped recording from the psychedelic void: the four-song/27-minute mini-album Solanaceae. From the opening track/title of “Hallucinogenic Black Cubes” onward, this mysterious entity makes it (malformed) mission clear – that you’re gonna get headfucked by a darker ‘n’ more drugged (d)evolution of sound. The muse may be more immediately deathrock in composition, but the execution of such defies conventional definitions of such; here, WHITE NIGHTS make sadistic dance music for malcontents and deviants, and drugs are optional if not encouraged. And while the soundfield may be raw ‘n’ distant, wrapping around these more melodic ruminations and evoking hauntological sensations, there’s actually a great deal of Technicolor tweaking going on above and below Solanaceae: a record ripe for headphone exploration. Which it so say nothing of the closing 13-minute title track….hearing is believing.
Life is grim. Find salvation within the magick mushroom cloud of WHITE NIGHTS’ Solanaceae.
Released by:
Iron Bonehead (Germany), 2021.
