You can almost smell the ozone when Ignis Absconditus hit the first note of their latest album, Transfigurations. It’s the sound of a band dragging their past behind them like a chain of smoking amp tubes and broken strings. They step into this record as if they’re building a shrine out of spare parts: wires, bones, abandoned riffs…then daring you to kneel before whatever it sparks to life.
Transfiguration opens like a lamp sputtering out its last light in a forgotten shrine, true to the name of the band, which translates from the Latin to “hidden fire.” Guitars drift with a kind of brittle calm, then warp into shapes that feel pulled from old myths scrawled on damp walls. Noctuaria’s voice moves through the mix with an eerie steadiness, with a slow draw of a trance that offers no map and no mercy.
If earlier work hinted at a worldview shaped by threshold spaces and buried symbols, this one barrels straight through. It’s a crooked temple built from distorted devotionals, basslines with teeth, and a voice that cuts through the gloom like a cold flame. For anyone drawn to post-punk unease, dark folk, avant-rock ritual, or the bleak devotional streak that once ran through Bauhaus, Christian Death, or the more dissonant corners of Voivod’s universe, this record reads like a half-burned scripture found in a locked drawer.
Watch the visualizer below, and preorder the album here.
Across ten tracks, Ignis Absconditus treats rock as raw material: something to melt down, twist, or puncture depending on the pressure of the moment. Sometimes it’s a cracked hymn, sometimes a jagged march, sometimes a whisper pressed against a wound. The production keeps everything close and almost claustrophobic, as if the microphones were pointed at a ritual instead of a rehearsal. Nothing breathes unless the band lets it.
The sense of unstable ceremony runs beneath every phrase. You get the feeling they are channeling half-formed apparitions, stray dreams, drifting symbols. Guitars wobble like heat on metal. Percussion clatters like machinery giving up its last ounce of patience. The pulse moves sideways, sometimes sinking, sometimes rising like something breaking the surface.
Their history – neofolk roots, strange 7-inches, that brief doom detour – haunts the corners without ever overwhelming their evolution. Ignis Absconditus call it their most accomplished work to date. Maybe so. What it actually feels like is possession: two artists letting some inner tide drag them deeper into their own feral logic, unafraid of the wreckage or the revelation waiting on the other side. And honestly, that’s where their fire burns brightest.
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