At some point in his career, Mat McNerney stopped merely writing music and started casting spells. The seventh album from his long-running project Hexvessel, Nocturne, lures you in with delicate piano, ghostly harmony, and the soft crunch of snow underfoot, only to leave you wandering through a forest of frostbitten riffs and whispered rites. The spell is slow, almost gentle, but unrelenting.
Nocturne began as a one-off commissioned performance—Music for Gloaming: A Nocturne—at Roadburn Festival in 2024. But rather than leave it as ephemera, McNerney expanded the idea into a fully realised studio album. It’s a continuation of the sonic language introduced on 2023’s Polar Veil—a turn toward atmospheric black metal that caught many off guard—but Nocturne feels more expansive, more deeply rooted in its own mythos. If Polar Veil was a doorway into a shadowed landscape, Nocturne is the winding path that disappears into the trees.
It opens with a brief piano motif that blurs into “Sapphire Zephyrs,” where the full band emerges like low fog rolling over a frozen lake. There’s black metal here, sure—the tremolo-picked guitars, the blasts of percussion—but they’re not wielded like weapons. Instead, they’re woven into the larger tapestry of sound, sharing space with Saara Nevalainen’s spectral vocals and McNerney’s alternation between rasped incantation and bard-like clean singing. The song unfolds slowly, confidently, and not without beauty. Think early Ulver by way of Dead Can Dance—ritualistic, yes, but not without warmth.
That balance is crucial. There’s a romanticism to Nocturne, albeit a bleak one. On “Inward Landscapes,” acoustic passages ripple through blackened ambience, like memories surfacing through murky water. A soaring, bittersweet guitar line cuts through the fog, evoking the wide-eyed melancholy of Blood Fire Death-era Bathory, but tempered by restraint. It’s a track that hints at catharsis without ever fully giving in to it. Again, McNerney resists the obvious.
Throughout the album, there’s a sense of pacing that feels cinematic, almost literary. Songs unfold like chapters, each introducing a new setting, a new facet of the night. “A Dark & Graceful Wilderness” leans into spoken word and minimal synth textures, conjuring something that feels like Popol Vuh or a Finnish Ligeti could have scored it. The track’s name is almost redundant—of course it’s a dark and graceful wilderness. That’s the very terrain Hexvessel traffics in.
“Spirit Masked Wolf” might be the album’s most immediate piece, its central riff grinding forward with a kind of doomed determination. But even here, there’s a patience to the arrangement that feels almost arcane. McNerney’s voice—somewhere between a shaman and a storyteller—carries the song through shifting moods, grounded always by Nevalainen’s keening presence. It’s not about climax, but transformation.
If the first half of Nocturne builds the world, the second half walks deeper into it. “Nights Tender Reckoning” offers something more dirge-like, its icy piano and layered guitars evoking a solemn procession rather than a blast of aggression. Here, the synth work is more pronounced, more textural, pulling the sound closer to the cosmic folk of early Hexvessel albums but with an added weight. It feels like something sacred is being mourned—or perhaps conjured.
“Mother Destroyer” follows, and the tempo picks up slightly, though the mood remains dense. There’s a ritualistic pulse beneath it, with layered guitar lines climbing over one another like roots seeking light. The vocals here have a theatrical quality, but they avoid tipping into melodrama. Again, restraint is key. Hexvessel never overplays its hand.
The album’s most surprising moment might be “Unworld,” which features Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez of Dødheimsgard on lead vocals. His appearance is both jarring and perfectly suited—his voice, distant and crumbling, adds another texture to Hexvessel’s palette. The song itself leans heavily into doom, its slow churn and choral accents creating something almost ecclesiastical. It’s a haunted hymn, half-remembered and whispered into the void.
Then there’s “Phoebus,” a closer that feels less like a resolution and more like a beckoning. Juho Vanhanen (Oranssi Pazuzu) adds a guttural presence, but the track remains melodic, even delicate. It spirals, rather than climbs, and by the time the final notes ring out, you feel as though you’ve come full circle. The brief piano motif from the beginning re-emerges, faintly, like a dream you can almost recall.
The production—handled by McNerney and Jaime Gomez Arellano—is crisp but organic. There’s a deliberate fuzz to the guitar tones, a gauzy warmth to the synths, a tactile presence to the acoustic instruments. Everything breathes, even when buried under layers of distortion. This is not music for playlists or background listening. It demands immersion.
A word, too, on the physical presentation: Benjamin König’s cover artwork is striking, evoking the same liminal mood as the music itself. A skull-faced figure rains frost over a mountain village—part myth, part omen. It fits. Hexvessel has always been a band concerned with thresholds, and Nocturne is an album about walking between worlds. The natural and the supernatural. The ancient and the modern. The real and the imagined.
There are echoes here: Ulver, of course, but also Katatonia, A Forest of Stars, early Arcturus. Yet Hexvessel doesn’t imitate. They extract what they need—texture, mood, structure—and shape it into something uniquely theirs. That’s the quiet genius of Nocturne. It’s not trying to be a black metal album with folk influences or a folk album wearing a black metal cloak. It’s something else. Something harder to define, and all the more compelling because of it.
Nocturne is set for release on June 13 via Prophecy Productions.
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