Black Spikes, the Lithuanian genre shifting modern progressive metallers, return with Ydos. A concept album that demands full and undivided attention.

BLACK SPIKES

Lithuania is not where the metal map usually sends you. It is a country with, by its own musicians’ cheerful admission, a scene small enough to fit in a rehearsal room, and a language almost nobody outside the Baltics can follow – which makes the rise of Black Spikes all the more improbable. Here is a Vilnius quintet who sing almost entirely in Lithuanian, build their songs on trap beats and blast beats in roughly equal measure, and have somehow parlayed that into a deal with Napalm Records and a run of European dates alongside Infected Rain. Ydos is the album meant to prove it was no fluke.

It is a concept record, and a properly ambitious one: a dark fairytale, in the band’s own phrase, in which each of its ten tracks hands a face and a name to one of humanity’s vices. Pride, greed, revenge, apathy, deceit – everyone is personified as their own demon, handed its own song, so the album plays less as a collection than as a single unspooling narrative. It is the band’s first attempt at a full concept album and their first record for Napalm, arriving on the back of a double nomination at Lithuania’s M.A.M.A. awards, the nearest thing the country has to the Grammys. For a band that once, by their own account, talked themselves out of even approaching a label this size, which is quite a turn.

MODERN PROGRESSIVE?

Sound-wise, Black Spikes sit in the modern-progressive lane that has lately thrown up the likes of Jinjer, Spiritbox and their own tourmates Infected Rain – writers have reached for all three, and the comparisons are fair enough – but the electronics push them somewhere colder and stranger. Producer Pavel Daniels, who recorded, mixed, and mastered the whole thing at the band’s own studio, keeps the guitars physical and the programming clinical, so the record lurches between crushing weight and glassy, cinematic calm without losing the thread. Frontwoman Agni is the constant: a voice that slides from a whispered near-lullaby to a full scream and back, sometimes inside a single bar, and it is her delivery in her mother tongue that gives Ydos its genuinely distinctive edge.

Pasaka is the overture, and it sets the register for everything after it: a nervy, clockwork unease that gathers into something grander and more ominous before Agni arrives, keening and trailed by screams. It is scene-setting rather than a song proper, but it does the job a good concept-album intro should, promising menace and then making you wait for it.

Motina is where the story proper begins, built on the album’s sharpest contrast: a hushed, near-lullaby opening that, by the label’s account, erupts without warning into the band’s heaviest extremes. Thematically, it is the birth of the vices, the mother from whom every demon on the record descends, which makes that quiet-to-violent shape feel purposeful rather than merely showy. It should be a strong early demonstration of what this band can do when they let the dynamics do the talking.

FOLDING TRAP BEATS

Melas is the record’s boldest genre-swerve, folding trap beats and outright rap into the metal without a flicker of apology. On paper it should not work; in practice, deceit gets a fittingly slippery, shape-shifting backing that refuses to sit still. It is the moment Ydos plants its flag as a modern-metal record rather than a traditionalist one, and whether it thrills or grates will hinge on your tolerance for rap-metal in 2026. I lean towards the former – it is at least a real risk, and the album is livelier for it.

Mara is framed as the vice of curiosity. The itch that drags you somewhere you should not go – and it prowls the border between calm and chaos, giving space to the quieter, more atmospheric side of the band’s writing before snapping back to the heavy. It is the kind of track that rewards the concept: knowing what it is about sharpens what it is doing.

Zelvar is the outlier, the one track sung in English and, by the band’s design, the vice of greed given demon form. Switching language is a canny move – it lands greed, of all things, in the tongue of the global market the band are reaching for, and it comes freighted with some of the album’s most immediately gripping riffs. For English-speaking listeners, it will be the easiest way in, the song that translates most directly, and it is smartly placed to do exactly that at the record’s midpoint.

MEDITATIONS ON REVENGE

Revana, the second single, and it is one of the most complete things on offer. A meditation on revenge as a loop that never actually closes, it pairs some of the record’s most memorable riffing with a genuinely unsettling video that draws on the seventeenth-century witch trials that reached Lithuania – women condemned as witches for being too inquisitive, too different, too much themselves. That imagery lends the song a weight beyond its hooks, and Agni sells the vengeance-as-trap idea with real venom. If the singles are the band’s calling cards, this is the stronger of the two.

Apatija is a harder trick to pull off because a song about numbness risks turning numbing itself. Black Spikes sidestep the trap by threading the track with jittery electronic breaks that keep the pulse up even as the subject flatlines, Agni moving through it more as a guide than a firebrand. It is a clever piece of writing that turns an awkward theme into one of the album’s more distinctive rhythmic workouts.

Aurea was the wider world’s introduction to this era, and it remains an excellent shop window. Pride, in the band’s own telling, is not swagger but decay – the confidence of being young and admired souring as the years, and the mirror, turn against you – and the song tracks that descent, heaving from cold, detuned heaviness into the electronic and back without ever quite settling. Its video, shot inside the Lithuanian Museum of Ethnocosmology, is a genuinely striking piece of work, the building’s stark, futuristic setting bent to something ritual and unnerving. As a statement of intent, it could hardly be clearer – this is a band who think in images as much as in riffs.

A CINEMATIC END

Senas Demonas arrives late and, on the evidence of its title and its place in the running order, looks set to be one of the album’s heaviest reckonings: the oldest, most entrenched vice of the lot, the one that has been with us longest. In a record this committed to its through-line, a penultimate track named for an ancient evil is unlikely to be there by accident, and I would expect it to serve as the story’s darkest hour before the close.

Dulkės closes the record, and the title alone does a lot of the lifting: everything, vices and virtues and the people who carry them alike, ending as dust. Positioned as the comedown after ten tracks of demons, it promises the album’s most reflective, cinematic note, the theatre finally lowering its voice. If it lands the way a closer this pointed should, Ydos ends not on a scream but on a settling – the fairytale, as fairytales tend to, arriving at its moral.

YDOS

Concept albums live or die on whether the concept earns its keep, and Ydos looks built from the ground up to justify its – one vice, one demon, one song, no makeweight tracks pretending to belong. The electronics, which in clumsier hands might have curdled into gimmick, are load-bearing here, part of how the band tell the story rather than decoration laid over the top.

There are questions only a full listen can answer. Ten tracks of unbroken thematic heaviness can tip into monotony if the song writing stops finding new angles, and a record that asks most of its audience to follow the feeling without the words leans hard on Agni and the arrangements to carry meaning across the distance. On the two singles, they carry it comfortably; sustaining that over forty minutes, in a language most listeners will not speak, is a taller order. But the ambition on show – a Lithuanian concept album about human vice, delivered with this much visual and musical confidence – is the kind of swing far bigger bands rarely bother to take.

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