New Music Review: BLACK SPIKES ‘Ydos’

BLACK SPIKES ‘Ydos’

Rating: 9 / 10 Stars

BLACK SPIKES is: Agni (vocals), Yaga (guitar, electronic elements), Mazvis (guitar), Sime (bass guitar), and Titas (drums)

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REVIEW – Plenty of concept albums tell stories. Ydos does something more unsettling: it turns the listener into part of the examination.

Across ten tracks, Lithuanian modern progressive metal band BLACK SPIKES construct a dark fairy tale in which human flaws stop being abstract weaknesses and begin taking physical form. Greed, revenge, apathy, pride, deception, mortality, and the darker impulses buried beneath ordinary existence become creatures, voices, environments, and psychological traps. The result is an album that does not simply ask what monsters might be hiding in the darkness. It asks how many of them were created by us.

Arriving August 28 through Napalm Records, Ydos is the band’s second album and its first for the label. That larger platform arrives at exactly the right moment because this does not sound like a group cautiously introducing itself to an international audience. BLACK SPIKES have built something dense, cinematic, aggressively modern, culturally specific, and completely uninterested in reducing itself to a single metal subgenre.

Progressive metal provides the architecture, but it is hardly the entire building.

Downtuned riffs collide with trap percussion. Rap cadences appear beside guttural vocals. Electronic loops coexist with blast beats. Orchestral textures create cinematic scale before the guitars tear holes through them. Djent-style synchronization, industrial repetition, blackened atmosphere, metalcore violence, acoustic passages, synths, clean melodies, and traditional heavy-metal instincts all occupy the same conceptual world.

That should be a disaster.

Instead, Ydos works because BLACK SPIKES treat genre as vocabulary rather than identity.

Every stylistic shift exists because the vice or emotional condition being explored demands a different language.

The album begins with “PASAKA,” Lithuanian for “Fairy Tale,” and the title immediately establishes that this journey is not supposed to be taken literally.

An unsettling ticking motif creates the first sense of movement, but it feels less like time passing than a mechanism counting down. Orchestral strings gradually expand around it while Agni’s voice becomes another ghost inside the arrangement. There is no need for distorted guitars yet. The threat already exists.

The official English translation reinforces the danger. The narrator promises to whisper softly, draw the listener inward, and tell stories until those stories become a form of enslavement. The fairy tale is therefore not an escape from reality.

It is bait.

That distinction becomes important as the album unfolds. Ydos repeatedly presents seduction before consequence. The demons do not usually arrive screaming. They invite themselves in.

“MOTINA” changes everything.

The lullaby atmosphere explodes into low-tuned progressive-metal violence, with synchronized riffs and guttural vocals colliding against a soaring clean chorus. If “PASAKA” opens the storybook, “MOTINA” gives birth to the creatures living inside it.

The song’s translated lyrics make that literal within the album’s mythology. Humanity’s flaws are called into existence as children. They rise from weakness, darkness spreads through sunlight, and the various entities that will dominate the rest of the album begin receiving names.

That is the conceptual ignition point.

Musically, BLACK SPIKES make the birth sound catastrophic.

The heaviness is important, but so is the contrast. Clean vocals do not soften the track. They make the surrounding violence feel larger. The song moves between something almost sacred and something monstrous, suggesting from the beginning that these vices are not alien invaders.

They belong to humanity.

“MELAS,” or “Lie,” is where the album’s willingness to mutate becomes impossible to ignore.

Booming 808s, trap hi-hats, rap cadences, electronic production, and downtuned metal breakdowns are thrown into the same space. Rather than feeling like modern production elements pasted onto a metal song, the digital language becomes part of the instability.

It is one of the album’s boldest stylistic pivots.

The lyric, however, takes the idea of deception somewhere darker than simple dishonesty.

Death hangs over the song.

The narrator questions whether people have spent their lives being fed comforting lies about what comes afterward. Is there another existence? Is there reunion? Is there peace? Or is there only nothingness?

That uncertainty gives “MELAS” an existential weight that its title alone does not reveal.

The lie may not be something another person tells you.

It may be something humanity collectively tells itself because the alternative is unbearable.

The electronic production makes that anxiety feel dislocated from the physical world. Everything sounds unstable, as though the ground beneath the song keeps changing material.

“MARA” takes another turn.

This is one of the record’s strongest exercises in dynamic contrast. Quiet ambient passages, echoing guitar textures and restrained vocals create space before sudden walls of progressive-metal violence rupture the calm.

The movement is remarkably fluid.

There is no sense that BLACK SPIKES are switching between a quiet song and a heavy song. Calm and calamity belong to the same emotional state.

The official material connects “MARA” to destructive curiosity, while the translated lyric pushes the imagery toward suffering, destruction and rebirth. Darkness grows beneath the skin. Light dissolves. Pain becomes something that must be burned away. The narrator wants to die symbolically in order to rise again.

That gives the song one of Ydos’ more complicated emotional positions.

Not every destructive impulse remains purely destructive.

Sometimes the willingness to enter darkness becomes the only way to escape it.

“ZELVAR” places greed under examination.

This is the album’s most overtly industrial moment, driven by cold electronic repetition and a mechanical pulse that makes the music feel deliberately inhuman. It is also the record’s only song incorporating English lyrics, which makes its recurring warnings stand out immediately.

Never close your eyes.

The instruction becomes increasingly ominous as the track develops.

Greed is not represented as wanting something simple. It becomes servitude. Desire turns the individual into a slave, grandeur blinds judgment, golden masks crack, and the thing feeding on human appetite develops more teeth the longer it is allowed to remain.

The industrial rhythm is perfect for that idea.

Greed becomes machinery.

Consumption becomes repetition.

You feed the system until eventually the system feeds on you.

“REVANA” personifies revenge, and BLACK SPIKES respond with some of the record’s most blackened and symphonic violence.

Minor-key orchestration creates a haunted atmosphere while rapid percussion and blast-beat aggression turn vengeance into forward momentum. There is very little emotional distance between the concept and the sound.

Revenge moves.

It pursues.

The translated lyric is filled with the language of pain being returned. The narrator will not be caught, will not be crushed, and promises instead to force another person to experience the suffering that created the desire for vengeance in the first place.

That is where the trap closes.

Revenge initially sounds empowering.

Then it becomes identity.

The person who has been harmed begins transforming into the very force that continues the harm.

That is one of Ydos’ central ideas: a vice does not have to begin as evil in order to become destructive.

“APATIJA,” or “Apathy,” is even more disturbing because it removes much of that emotional fire.

The music becomes calculated, futuristic and repetitive. Guitar patterns feel almost robotic. Rhythms lock into loops. Warmth disappears intentionally.

If “REVANA” burns, “APATIJA” freezes.

The translated lyric centers on a mother left behind, planting roses, watering them with tears, and remembering a son who has gone away and will not return.

That is an unexpectedly human foundation for a song about emotional numbness.

Apathy is not portrayed as simply refusing to care.

It becomes what can remain after feeling too much for too long.

The futuristic production makes the emotional absence more unnerving. Agni’s voice moves through the arrangement almost like the final trace of humanity inside a system that has learned to function without it.

Then “AUREA” arrives like ego given a heartbeat.

This is one of the fastest and most technically aggressive tracks on the record. Galloping double-bass drums push hard underneath rapid guitar work while the arrangement repeatedly accelerates toward excess.

Pride is not depicted with subtlety because pride rarely experiences itself subtly.

Everything becomes larger.

Faster.

Higher.

More important.

The lyric uses youth, beauty, mirrors, glass towers and decay to create a striking image of ego attempting to negotiate with time. The narrator worships the reflection while youth remains intact. But mirrors eventually crack.

That turns the song into something more interesting than a simple condemnation of vanity.

Pride is ultimately powerless against mortality.

The glass tower might elevate you above everyone else, but it cannot stop the body from aging beneath you.

The relentless speed makes the realization feel almost desperate.

Keep moving.

Keep climbing.

Keep admiring the reflection.

Maybe the mirror will never change.

Of course it does.

“SENAS DEMONAS,” or “Old Demon,” initially appears almost traditional compared with the mutations surrounding it.

A groovier bass foundation and mid-tempo heavy-metal structure give the song one of the most immediate physical hooks on the record. The arrangement feels familiar enough to become inviting.

That accessibility is deceptive.

The old demon is not merely another creature introduced into the mythology. It represents something more permanent.

The lyrics question happiness itself.

Fake kindness, meaningless laughter and empty joy are dismissed as illusions. Humanity searches for meaning where the narrator claims none exists. Darkness becomes both burden and response.

This is perhaps the album’s bleakest philosophical moment because there is no obvious enemy to defeat.

How do you destroy a demon that has convinced you everything else is false?

The groove keeps pulling the listener forward while the words remove certainty beneath it.

That contrast gives “SENAS DEMONAS” its power.

And then everything becomes dust.

“DULKĖS” closes Ydos not with another violent climax but with something much more difficult to escape: mortality.

The distorted weight recedes.

Acoustic instrumentation, synth textures and orchestral layers create a cinematic ending that feels almost spiritual after everything preceding it.

The lyric reduces human existence to its final physical truth.

Bodies disappear.

The past fractures.

The future belongs to somebody else.

Dust remains.

But BLACK SPIKES do not leave the idea there.

Dust also becomes possibility.

Life can grow again from what has vanished. The individual is temporary, but existence continues beyond the individual’s ability to witness it.

That makes “DULKĖS” simultaneously the darkest and most peaceful song on the album.

The record begins with a fairy tale designed to draw the listener into captivity.

It ends by destroying the illusion that any of us remain forever.

Between those points, Ydos becomes increasingly clear as a study of attachment.

Attachment to desire.

Attachment to revenge.

Attachment to youth.

Attachment to certainty.

Attachment to stories about death.

Attachment even to suffering itself.

The demons exist because people feed them.

That is where BLACK SPIKES elevate Ydos beyond its very effective surface aesthetics.

It would be easy to admire this record simply because it sounds adventurous.

The production is enormous. Agni’s vocal range moves convincingly from cleans and whispers into screams, gutturals and rapid-fire rhythmic delivery. Yaga’s combination of guitar and electronic elements becomes one of the album’s defining signatures, while Mazvis ensures the guitar arrangements remain capable of moving from progressive precision to genuine brutality. Sime and Titas repeatedly provide the physical foundation necessary to keep the band’s electronic experiments connected to something human and immediate.

But technical range is not the real accomplishment.

Control is.

There are many bands capable of combining genres.

Far fewer understand when not to use everything simultaneously.

“MELAS” needs trap production.

“ZELVAR” needs mechanical repetition.

“REVANA” needs blast-beat violence.

“APATIJA” needs emotional coldness.

“AUREA” needs speed.

“DULKĖS” needs space.

The choices create identities for individual tracks while maintaining the feeling that all ten belong inside the same nightmare.

The Lithuanian language is equally important.

Rather than treating an international Napalm Records release as a reason to abandon their linguistic identity, BLACK SPIKES allow Lithuanian to become part of the album’s atmosphere. Even without reading translations, the cadence and phonetic character of the language fit the folkloric darkness surrounding the concept.

Once the English translations are considered, the depth becomes even greater.

That is important because Ydos could easily have become an exercise in visual concept and sonic excess.

It does not.

The songs hold up the mythology.

The mythology gives the stylistic experiments purpose.

And the production gives the entire thing enough scale to feel like a world rather than a collection of tracks.

There is an obvious risk in making an album this conceptually deliberate.

Listeners who want immediate verse-chorus familiarity may occasionally feel as though they have entered the story halfway through. The shifts between orchestration, trap rhythms, industrial electronics, progressive metal, blackened aggression and cinematic ambience require attention.

But that demand is part of the appeal.

Ydos is not background music.

It wants the listener inside the room.

It wants the demons close enough to recognize.

Most importantly, it never allows its philosophical ideas to drain the physical excitement out of the metal.

There are riffs here designed to make bodies move.

There are choruses that remain lodged in memory.

There are blast beats, breakdowns, gallops, hooks and electronic drops capable of existing without the conceptual explanation surrounding them.

That matters.

A concept album still has to work as an album.

Ydos does.

For a band entering its Napalm Records era, BLACK SPIKES have chosen an unusually ambitious way to introduce themselves to a much larger international audience.

They could have simplified.

They could have switched predominantly to English.

They could have polished their progressive instincts into something easier to categorize.

Instead, they made a Lithuanian-language dark fairy tale about humanity creating and feeding its own demons.

That decision tells you nearly everything you need to know.

When Ydos arrives August 28, the easiest reaction will be to talk about how many different genres BLACK SPIKES manage to fit inside forty minutes.

The more important question is why those genres are there.

Every change serves another flaw.

Every flaw creates another creature.

And by the time “DULKĖS” reduces all of them back to dust, the album’s ugliest realization becomes unavoidable.

The monsters were never outside the temple.

We brought them with us.

For more information on BLACK SPIKES, visit:

www.BlackSpikes.lt
www.Facebook.com/BlackSpikesBand
www.Instagram.com/BlackSpikes_Band
www.YouTube.com/@BlackSpikes_Band
www.Spotify.com/BlackSpikes