Visitant is a new Technical/Progressive Black Metal project formed by Voraath (RIP Joshua Ward) vocalist Chelsea Marrow, who you may know from her voice being used on The Doom Eternal and Senua: II Hellblade video games, as well as Anthony Lusk-Simone (drums/orchestration) from Abiotic, Kilian Duarte (bass) also from Abiotic and Scale the Summit, and Taylor Tidwell from Unaligned.
And this project kills, and certainly I’d immediately recommend it for fans of another progressive black metal-ish band with a killer vocalist named Chelsea (Murphy), Dawn of Ouroboros, and maybe Oubliette, also fronted by a killer female screecher, Emily Low, and the disbanded Minnesota black metal act False (fronted by Rachel Niehorster).
This is really good stuff, and certainly not just because Anthony Lusk-Simone delivers some subtle but very well-used keyboards here and there, making this a quasi-symphonic black metal release. Not sweeping, bombastic Dimmu Borgir-type theatrics, but some well-sprinkled ivories and strings adding some subtle but still dramatic majesty to tracks like opener “Unworldly”, “Starless”, “Fodder”, and “Envy’s Lament”.
Like Murphy in Dawn of Ouroborus, Marrow delivers an array of vocal styles such as fierce screams, growls, howls, and a few somber croons; all are on display for the second track “Briars”, and the superb closer “Envy’s Lament”, my favorite track on the album, along with the opener.
“Moon Bathe” ends the album with a short Arab-esque instrumental. I would have preferred another full, longer song as the album is fairly short (barely 30 minutes or so), so it feels a little like an EP with only 6 songs, but it’s worth it for those 6, and certainly a band I will be keeping a close eye on.
