Mære begins with the burden already in place. “I, Pallbearer” opens through ascending guitar lines and a rhythm that seems determined to keep walking despite the weight pressing downward. A pallbearer carries the dead, but the song enlarges that task until it becomes an identity. J.J. does not sound like someone attending one funeral. He sounds condemned to transport every absence he has accumulated, including friends, relationships, abandoned homes and earlier versions of himself.
The title of Harakiri for the Sky’s fifth album refers to the mare of Germanic and Scandinavian folklore, a malicious nocturnal presence believed to sit upon a sleeping person’s chest and produce paralysis, suffocation and terror. The word survives inside “nightmare,” but Mære returns the fear to its physical origin. Something enters during sleep, applies weight and prevents the body from moving even while consciousness remains painfully alert.
That condition describes the album’s emotional mechanism. These songs are full of attempted movement: leaving towns, crossing oceans, climbing mountains, drinking through nights, outrunning memories and imagining reunion with the dead. Yet every journey remains pinned beneath grief. The guitars surge forward while J.J.’s voice stays trapped inside the same recurring thoughts.
Mære expands the method established on Arson rather than replacing it. Matthias Sollak again constructs long post-black-metal songs from tremolo melody, post-rock accumulation, melodic death-metal force and hardcore urgency. Most tracks pass eight minutes, and “I’m All About the Dusk” exceeds eleven. The two-CD format is practical, but it also suits a record too large to feel like one uninterrupted sitting. The pause between discs resembles waking briefly before the pressure returns.
“I, Pallbearer” immediately makes clear that the album is less interested in metaphorical sadness than in direct inventories of loss. J.J.’s lyrics describe cleaning a dead friend’s apartment, bipolarity, psychosis, alcohol and the unbearable imbalance between surviving and believing someone else deserved survival more. The writing occasionally risks sounding like every bleak thought has been copied from a notebook without filtration, but that excess is part of the band’s appeal. Harakiri for the Sky does not present despair after it has been disciplined into elegant symbolism.
The music provides the discipline the lyrics refuse. Sollak’s layered guitars establish clear emotional architecture around the flood of words. One line supplies forward motion, another widens the atmosphere, and a higher melody rises above both. Krimh’s drums keep the song from collapsing under its own length, changing the physical meaning of each repeated riff through blasts, double-bass movement and carefully controlled cymbal work.
“Sing for the Damage We’ve Done” is the album’s most immediately complete song. Its central melody carries the grand, wounded lift Harakiri for the Sky has refined across several records, but Neige’s clean voice changes the emotional geometry. J.J.’s scream sounds trapped inside consequence, while Neige seems to float above it like memory, forgiveness or the unreachable version of the relationship before damage occurred.
The guest appearance does not turn the track into an Alcest song. Neige appears selectively, providing contrast rather than taking over the arrangement. His voice makes the surrounding harshness feel more severe because it introduces a possible calm that the song cannot maintain.
The phrase “sing for the damage we’ve done” treats music as witness rather than cure. Singing does not reverse the damage. It gives the damage a shared form. The song acknowledges that silence also has consequences, but words cannot guarantee repair once they finally arrive.
“Us Against December Skies” turns winter into memory. December is cold, but it is also calendrical, the period when another year closes and accumulated absence becomes measurable. The song remembers companionship through streets and seasons while accepting that the remembered closeness no longer exists.
Sollak’s guitars repeatedly lift the track toward something almost triumphant. This is one of the band’s defining contradictions. The melodies often suggest victory, open landscape and emotional release, while the lyrics insist that nothing has been overcome. The result is not false hope. It is the sound of the body producing energy after the mind has abandoned the possibility of destination.
“I’m All About the Dusk” stretches that contradiction across eleven minutes. Dusk is neither day nor night, but the visible process of one condition becoming another. J.J. identifies with the threshold itself: twilight, mist, uncertainty and life spent longing for a darkness that has not fully arrived.
The song’s length allows its central ideas to recur almost ritualistically. Guitar melodies return after long instrumental movement, gathering new emotional pressure each time. Krimh is especially important here, shifting from controlled propulsion into full black-metal force without making the changes feel pasted together.
The track also reveals the danger of Mære’s scale. Harakiri for the Sky has become exceptionally skilled at building long emotional structures, but skill can harden into formula. Several songs rely upon similar rises, tremolo shapes and climactic returns. Heard individually, they are powerful. Across eighty-four minutes, their resemblance becomes impossible to ignore.
“Three Empty Words” pushes lyrical repetition toward its limit. Love, apology and farewell hover as phrases whose meaning has been emptied through failure or lateness. The song gathers quotations, maxims, images of storms, funerals and broken hearts into a vast emotional scrapbook.
Some lines land with uncomfortable directness, while others resemble motivational phrases dragged into a depressive context. The effect is messy, but the mess feels true to the record’s psychology. Mære is filled with language because silence has become intolerable, even when language can no longer distinguish personal revelation from phrases inherited from songs, films and ordinary conversation.
The music prevents the track from becoming only verbal accumulation. Its melodic center is strong enough to survive the lyrics’ density, and the arrangement repeatedly clears space before building again. Harakiri for the Sky understands that catharsis requires withholding. Constant climax would flatten the emotion into atmosphere.
“Once Upon a Winter” turns nostalgia toward geography. Mountains, snow, home and burial become inseparable. Home is not merely where someone was born but where the body imagines finally being placed. The landscape becomes maternal and funerary at once.
The song has one of Mære’s most patient openings, allowing the guitars to establish distance before the full band arrives. When the faster movement begins, it feels like weather crossing the mountains rather than a conventional tempo change.
The winter imagery is familiar territory for atmospheric black metal, but Harakiri for the Sky approaches it through contemporary emotional language rather than mythic wilderness. These mountains are not untouched realms beyond society. They are connected to lost relationships, urban alienation and the desire to be buried somewhere that still resembles belonging.
“And Oceans Between Us” makes separation physically enormous. The song describes a relationship that cannot be restored even though emotional attachment remains active. Oceans become the measurable distance between two people who continue occupying one another’s memories.
The main guitar figure is among the album’s most immediate, moving with enough clarity to resemble a post-rock anthem before the vocals tear open its surface. Krimh’s drumming gives the track relentless forward momentum, but every lyric describes fading, poisoning and the inability to become someone different.
This tension between motion and stasis is Mære’s deepest strength. The songs never sound physically defeated. They sprint, climb and expand. Paralysis exists inside all that motion, proving that activity and escape are not the same thing.
“Silver Needle // Golden Dawn” brings addiction, suicide and occult radiance into one divided title. Silver suggests the needle’s cold physical reality; gold suggests light, transcendence or the delusion that self-destruction may open into something purer. The anonymous vocalist from Gaerea adds a second harsh presence, making the song feel less like solitary confession and more like two figures recognizing the same enclosure.
The track is one of the album’s darker pieces, with riffs that feel more severe and less openly luminous than those surrounding them. The guest voice does not provide relief. It thickens the despair, turning the song into shared testimony without implying solidarity is sufficient to stop the damage.
“Time Is a Ghost” treats chronology as another haunting. The past no longer exists, the future has not arrived and the present disappears while being experienced. Time becomes a ghost because it affects everything without possessing a stable body.
The song gathers many of the album’s recurring conditions: sleeplessness, alcohol, travel, buried hope, coldness and the sense that every ordinary act resembles an ending. Sollak’s melodies remain expansive, but the repeated declarations of “end times” make expansion feel less like opening than the widening of an abyss.
The original material could have ended there, with the band’s entire emotional system dissolving into the impossibility of holding time. Instead, the album closes with Placebo’s “Song to Say Goodbye.”
The choice is almost too perfect. Placebo has long written about damaged intimacy, addiction, sexual ambiguity, resentment and the point where farewell becomes both accusation and self-indictment. Harakiri for the Sky enlarges the song into its own language without destroying the original’s direct emotional spine.
J.J.’s scream removes Brian Molko’s cool, wounded distance, while the guitars turn the song’s concise alternative-rock structure into a broad post-black-metal farewell. The cover works because Harakiri for the Sky does not treat Placebo as a guilty pleasure requiring metallic correction. The band recognizes an existing kinship and increases its scale.
Placed after nine enormous songs, “Song to Say Goodbye” also provides unexpected economy. It lasts less than six minutes and follows a comparatively direct structure. After Mære’s long internal monologues, another writer’s song says goodbye with sharper boundaries.
The album’s artwork by Art of Maquenda presents a pale, spectral figure surrounded by organic and dreamlike detail. The image avoids the burning spectacle of Arson. It is quieter and more inward, suggesting sleep, fever, transformation and the threatening closeness of something whose exact anatomy cannot be trusted.
That cover suits an album named for nighttime paralysis. The Mære is terrifying not because it attacks from a visible distance but because it occupies the body’s most vulnerable state. It presses against the chest, interrupts breathing and turns the familiar bed into a trap.
The music recreates that weight through abundance. Mære is deliberately exhausting. Ten songs, eighty-four minutes, repeated climaxes and lyrics overflowing with grief make the album difficult to absorb casually. It does not offer the neat arc of a shorter record whose darkness resolves into clarity by the final track.
At times, the length weakens individual impact. “Three Empty Words” and “Once Upon a Winter” contain ideas that might have struck harder with several minutes removed. J.J.’s vocal register remains relatively consistent, and the constant intensity can make separate crises resemble one long crisis.
Yet reducing Mære to bloat misses what the album is designed to express. Nightmares do not observe editorial discipline. Grief repeats information already understood. Anxiety returns to the same physical sensations and asks the same questions without accepting previous answers.
Arson sounded like emotional ruin being set on fire. Mære sounds like what happens when the smoke enters the bedroom and remains there through the night. The flames are less visible, but breathing has become harder.
The two-CD edition makes this scale tangible. One disc cannot hold the full emotional load, so the album physically divides itself while refusing to become two separate works. The listener turns to the second half and reenters the same weather.
Mære does not overcome the creature on the chest. It studies the pressure, gives every buried memory another melody and waits for morning without trusting morning to arrive. The body remains pinned, but the guitars keep moving beneath it.
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