Published: January 2, 2025

With members from New Zealand and Australia, “Spleen”, the first full-length from Orphans At Dusk, makes its way to me here in Michigan, U.S.A. via Hypnotic Dirge Records from Portugal. This is one well-traveled CD! Lol. Grab your goth clothes, your Lost Boys DVD and maybe a glass of wine and partake in this review!

“Spleen” is a very very atmospheric Goth/Doom/Black Metal album. For starters, the keyboards are some of the best I’ve heard in a while. Piano sounds, funeral organs, spacey and mesmerizing soundscapes meander through the various Metal genres on the album and it all together sounds darkly beautiful. The album reminds me a lot of Type O Negative, but with some Black Metal nuances. The musicianship is amazing and the songwriting phenomenal. This is fucking awesome music, my friends!

The vocals are very influenced by the late, great Peter Steele, but the vocalist also uses a great Blackened vocal style which sets him apart from Peter. The lyrics are dark and bleak with a subtle bit of humor. Tales of romance, death, ghosts, vampires and more are found here, and all the lyrics are interesting.

The production is great and no one thing overpowers the others. Keyboards can be hard to get right on an album, but they are perfect here.

The cover art was done by Moreno Matkovic and looks to be a photo (maybe a painting?) of a castle at nighttime that has an eerie green light shining around it. Creepy! The booklet pages are done in one of the coolest color schemes I’ve ever seen. All of the pages are a sort of toxic green and the artwork and lyrics are black. It’s pleasing to look at and it’s easy for me to read the lyrics. Other bands and labels should take note of this as it sucks when you get an interesting album, and you can’t read the lyrics.

“Spleen” is a very accomplished album full of unique ideas. Upon doing research for this album, I found out this is the first thing they put out after releasing an EP way back in 2014. I hope we don’t have to wait that long for another album as this rules hard.