Dmitry Marchenko has spent the better part of a decade building something that had no obvious template. Operating as Këkht Aräkh, assembling a body of work that sits at an uncomfortable and entirely productive crossroads: black metal stripped of the genre’s more theatrical posturing and refitted with something rawer and more personal. Morning Star, his third album and his first on Sacred Bones, is the fullest realisation of that project so far.

MORNING STAR

What the debut EP Through the Branches to Eternity sketched and the albums Night & Love and Pale Swordsman developed was a sound built on genuine opposition: passages of driving, unsparing black metal held in tension with songs of startling quietness and melodic directness. Neither side of that equation was decorative. Both mattered, and the contrast between them was the whole point. On Morning Star, that tension has not been resolved — it has been deepened, given new weight and new room to breathe. This is an artist with a much clearer command of his own tools than he had four years ago, and it shows in every production decision and every track placement on this record.

At seventeen tracks, Morning Star is a record that asks something of you. It is built with care for sequence and cumulative effect, and it rewards the listener who gives it their full attention rather than dipping in and out. The album has an internal architecture — a sense that each piece has been placed where it sits for a reason — and that patience is what allows the closing title track to land with the gravity it does.

What has always separated Dmitry’s writing from the broader black metal field is a refusal to hide behind abstraction. These songs deal in real things — displacement, the passage of time, the particular loneliness of being far from where you began — and they do so with a plainness of address that can be disarming. Morning Star continues and extends that approach, drawing on a period of significant personal change and the creative block that preceded the album’s completion. That struggle is audible in the music, not as a problem but as a quality: it gives the record a hard-won immediacy that no amount of technical polish could manufacture.

CONFIDENT & PURPOSEFUL

Wänderer opens the album and immediately establishes where you are. The guitars move against each other with that characteristic lo-fi warmth — not a production limitation, but a deliberate sonic personality — and the themes of forward motion and rootlessness that run through the whole record announce themselves from the first minute. It is a confident and purposeful opening from a songwriter who has learned to trust his own instincts.

The album’s early run takes you through Lament and then Angest, the latter among the most emotionally forceful things on the record — a track whose sense of inner friction feels lived-in rather than constructed. The Scandinavian-language tracks scattered throughout Morning Star are not stylistic gestures; they carry a different register of directness, a kind of bluntness that translation might soften, and they integrate naturally into the album’s world rather than reading as interludes. Genom sorgen, featuring VS-55, is a case in point: the language carries its weight without needing you to understand every word.

THREE WINTERS AWAY

Of the tracks previewed ahead of release, Three Winters Away is the one that lodges most deeply. A meditation on the four years between this album and Pale Swordsman — on what that stretch of time cost, changed, and revealed — it works because it holds its conclusions back. The song circles its subject rather than landing on it, and the result is a track that opens outward into whatever the listener brings to it. That structural openness is harder to achieve than it looks, and Dmitry pulls it off with apparent ease. This is the album’s first genuinely arresting moment, and one of its most enduring.

The album’s most unexpected move is Eternal Martyr, which places Drain Gang’s Bladee as a featured vocalist with co-written lyrics. The collision of black metal and experimental cloud rap is not the kind of thing that should cohere, and yet it does — convincingly, and without feeling like a calculated gesture toward crossover appeal. Both artists operate at some distance from the centres of their respective genres, and both share a commitment to emotional honesty over aesthetic posture. The track is sparse and slightly vertiginous, and Bladee’s particular brand of lyrical bleakness slots into the surrounding guitar work as though it had always been there. The two worlds press against each other throughout the track and never quite separate. That is a harder thing to achieve in practice than it appears in retrospect.

RAVEN KING

Drömsång follows as the record’s most suspended and inward moment — a track that revisits and reimagines earlier material with a stillness that carries the full weight of what surrounds it. Its placement near the album’s midpoint is deliberate and well-judged: it is a breath before the second half, and it changes the character of everything that comes after it.

If the album has a centrepiece, Raven King makes the strongest claim to it. The track builds from a contained opening figure into something considerably larger, and Dmitry’s work as a multi-instrumentalist is at its most assured here — the riff structure has a sense of inevitability to it, as though each part was always going to arrive where it does. It is the kind of track that makes repeated listening feel like uncovering rather than repetition, and it sits at the heart of the album’s second movement with quiet authority. This record has spent considerable time in my ears, and Raven King is a significant reason why.

The two-part Land av evig natt is the album’s deepest interior — a passage of cold and considerable darkness that the record must travel through before it can arrive at its closing movement. Part one compresses; part two opens a crack of light. By the time Gates delivers you to the title track, the record has earned the gravity it now asks you to carry.

EMOTIONAL WEIGHT

The title track arrives last and closes the album without fanfare or triumph. It is a piece that earns its stillness — not a resolution in any clean sense, but a point of rest after the record’s accumulated emotional weight. Dmitry is not a writer who ties things up, and Morning Star, the song, reflects that: it offers a resting point, a vantage from which to look back at what you have just passed through, and then it ends. The record lands where its title always implied it would.

The production choices across Morning Star are integral to what the record achieves. VS-55 and Varg2™’s tape Portastudio approach — sound design and mastering handled through analogue recording rather than digital polish — gives the album a grain and physical presence that serves the music on both its harsh and its delicate ends. It makes the brutal passages feel more corporeal and the quiet ones more intimate.

A MOMENT OF CLARITY

The biographical fact of Dmitry’s displacement from Mykolaiv, the years spent building this project without institutional support, the sustained commitment to a sound he had to invent for himself — none of this is offered here as a selling point. It is simply present in the music, as the background radiation of a body of work made by someone who has had to listen carefully to his own experience in order to say anything at all. These songs have that quality. They take the experience of being alive in the world seriously, and they do it without sentimentality or performance.

Morning Star is a substantial achievement and the strongest thing Këkht Aräkh has made. It is the record that makes the project’s full range and ambition legible — not a beginning and not a peak, but a moment of real clarity from an artist who has arrived at an understanding of what he is capable of and what he wants to do with it. For anyone coming to this music for the first time, start here. For those who have been paying attention, this is the record that confirms what was already suspected. Either way, the morning star is worth waiting up for.

Këkht Aräkh: Bandcamp

At The Barrier: Facebook / X / Instagram