Dymna Lotva take another evolutionary step on their fourth LP, Vyraj. The rebellious Belarussian dissidents powerfully demonstrate that they are far more than a ‘one-trick pony’ in every conceivable artistic aspect.

DEATH, DEPARTURE & MEMORY

An ancient stone structure sits beneath an enormous night sky from an unknown Ukrainian astro-photographer, the Milky Way stretching above it as if the earth were only a temporary place beneath something infinitely older. It is a fitting image for an album concerned with death, departure, memory and the idea of finding a way home when home itself has become unreachable.

Dymna Lotva have always drawn deeply from Belarusian folklore, history and the landscapes of their culture, but Vyraj expands that world considerably. Their fourth full-length does not sit comfortably inside the familiar boundaries of post-black metal or doom. Those foundations remain, but around them grow symphonic passages, neoclassical arrangements, folk textures, choral voices and moments of almost theatrical recitation. The result is less a collection of metal songs than a strange procession through different forms of grief, mythology and remembrance.

The title itself refers to Vyraj, the mythical realm towards which the souls of the dead travel, and the album’s obsession with the night sky gives that journey a physical shape.

ZORY

Zory, the opening track, immediately places the Milky Way at the centre of the story: the stars become a road leading towards Vyraj, while the dead are carried along a landscape where rivers, empty houses and foreign soil become part of the same passage. There is something particularly painful in the idea expressed here that the land may be foreign, while the sky remains the same. Borders can divide people from their homes, but they cannot divide them from the stars above them.

Musically, Zory already shows how much wider Dymna Lotva’s palette has become. The black-metal aggression is still present, but it is surrounded by a much more expansive sense of arrangement, allowing the atmosphere to breathe rather than simply collapse under its own weight. This is where the album’s neoclassical side starts to reveal itself, and it is also where I began hearing echoes of Sopor Aeternus. Not simply in the vocals, but in the way beauty, mourning and theatrical darkness are allowed to exist together.

Nokt Aeon’s voice is one of the album’s most remarkable elements. Calling her versatile almost feels insufficient because there are moments when it genuinely sounds as though several different singers have entered the record. Her harsher black-metal vocals can suddenly give way to clean passages, deeper tones or recitative sections, changing the emotional identity of the music around them. There are moments in which I hear something reminiscent of Irakli Kirkitadze’s spoken and recitative delivery in Psychonaut 4, but the stronger comparison throughout Vyraj is undoubtedly Anna-Varney Cantodea and Sopor Aeternus. The theatricality, the neoclassical shades and the way the voice seems to inhabit different characters all contribute to the sensation that this album is being performed as much as it is being sung.

VEHA

Veha deepens that theatrical quality. Its world is one where prison and coffin become strangely interchangeable, where home belongs simultaneously to the living and the dead. Even the grotesque image of devils bathing in a lake carries something folkloric and almost storybook-like before the song sinks back into darkness. The contrast between imprisonment and death is particularly important to the album: one is physically trapped, the other permanently removed, yet both are forms of separation. Dymna Lotva make that distinction feel disturbingly thin.

THE BOAT OF DESPAIR

Then comes The Boat of Despair, where Belarusian literature, Greek mythology and the old European fascination with death meet in the same vessel. The song draws from Uladzimir Karatkevich’s Laddzia Rospačy (The Boat of Despair), a work in which a Belarusian nobleman faces Death while refusing to surrender his attachment to life, love and his homeland. Dymna Lotva then place this distinctly Belarusian story beside the ancient figure of Charon, the ferryman carrying souls towards the underworld.

It is an image that has travelled through centuries of European art. I could not help thinking of the Danse Macabre, where death becomes the one force capable of dragging every social class into the same dance, and of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, where Death becomes an actual presence confronting a human being who desperately wants to understand what lies beyond the silence. Yet Dymna Lotva do not make death purely passive. Their ferryman is blind, the boat goes nowhere, and the dead refuse to accept the rules imposed upon them. Even in death there is defiance. Even in the underworld there is a demand for freedom.

Aaron Stainthorpe’s appearance (Towards The Sinister / High Parasite / ex-My Dying Bride ) on the track makes perfect sense within this landscape. His voice carries its own history of doom, but here it feels less like a guest appearance and more like another figure emerging from the fog surrounding the boat. The song becomes theatrical without losing its heaviness, as though the old myths of the underworld have been dragged into a Belarusian landscape.

RETURN MY COFFIN HOME

Return My Coffin Home is the album’s devastating final movement. Here, everything that has been circling around Vyraj seems to converge: the stars, the road, exile, death, folklore and the longing for home. The song uses an authentic Belarusian protective spell for a safe journey, alongside Ukrainian language and the traditional song Plyve kacha po Tysyni, which became widely known as a requiem for fallen Ukrainian heroes. The image is brutally simple: if the journey home cannot be completed alive, then let the body make it instead.

It immediately brought to my mind the ancient Greek tradition of returning a fallen warrior to his homeland. For the Greeks, bringing the dead home was not merely a matter of geography. Burial meant rest, remembrance and belonging; the body had to return to the community from which the warrior had come. A grave preserved the person’s name against oblivion. Dymna Lotva take that ancient image and place it inside the much more immediate reality of exile, war and political displacement.

NEOCLASSICAL DARKNESS

There is also something unmistakably Sopor Aeternus in the song’s neoclassical darkness and theatrical mourning. Anna-Varney’s influence feels particularly close here, not because Dymna Lotva imitate the project, but because both understand that death can be made theatrical without becoming artificial. Nokt’s voice shifts again, becoming something larger than a single narrator. It feels as though different voices, different dead and different memories are gathering around the same final journey.

The album began beneath the stars and ends with the body asking to be taken home. Between those two points, Dymna Lotva move through Belarusian folklore, Karatkevich, Charon, the Greek underworld, the Danse Macabre, Bergman’s Death, Sopor Aeternus’ gothic theatricality and the mourning songs of Ukraine. Yet none of these references feel randomly assembled. They all lead towards the same question: what does home mean when you can no longer return to it?

Vyraj does not offer an easy answer. Perhaps it cannot. Instead, it builds a mythology around the wound itself. The stars become a road. The coffin becomes a vessel. The dead become travellers. And somewhere beyond the borders drawn by human beings, the sky remains the same.

For Dymna Lotva, that may be the closest thing to a map home.

Dymna Lotva: Bandcamp

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