Album Review: Lhaäd – Beyond
Band: Lhaäd
Title: Beyond
Label: Amor Fati Records
Release date: April 19th, 2025
Country: Belgium
Format reviewed: CD Quality Digital Promo
Album Review: Lhaäd – Beyond via Amor Fati Records by Consanguineus
Filip Dupont is a name that’s become synonymous with prolific creativity in the extreme music underground. The Belgian multi-instrumentalist and composer has built a formidable body of work across a range of projects Hemelbestormer, Ritual of the Dead Hand, Wolven, Entartung, Nox, and Lhaäd each offering a different lens into his musical vision. What ties them all together is a commitment to authenticity and depth. His latest release, Beyond, marks the third full-length from Lhaäd and is once again out via Amor Fati Productions, a label known for championing boundary-pushing Black Metal.
Lhaäd sees Dupont operating within the Black Metal idiom, but his take on the genre is anything but orthodox. A member of The Nox Entity Collective, he incorporates industrial textures and a dense atmospheric palette into his compositions. While there are shades of Thorns’ avant-garde edge and the cosmic bleakness of Darkspace, Lhaäd never feels like an imitation. Instead, it charts its own course harsh, immersive, and deeply personal.
Beyond completes a conceptual trilogy that began with Below and continued with Beneath. All three albums are inspired by the hadopelagic zone the deepest part of the ocean, named after Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. It’s a place devoid of light and largely untouched by human presence, where extreme pressure and eternal darkness define existence. Even the project’s name, Lhaäd, is an anagram of “Hadal,” further underscoring its thematic focus.
If Below was the descent into the abyss and Beneath explored the crushing stillness of life at the bottom, Beyond looks further to what lies outside the physical limits of the ocean, beyond the known and the perceptible. The record stretches toward a metaphysical space, using repetition, dissonance, and layered sound design to create an almost hallucinatory listening experience.
Rather than functioning purely as a Black Metal album, Beyond feels more like an existential ritual. It’s music as inner journey an exploration not just of the ocean’s depths, but of the human psyche and the idea of the unknowable. In a discography already rich with atmosphere and intensity, Beyond stands out as a powerful, fitting conclusion to Lhaäd’s descent into the deep. 8/10
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8/10 To Greatness and Glory!
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