Dreams are no longer just the soundtracks to sleep. Dreams are a disease, transmitted from sleeper to sleeper, gaining strength until it consumes the final victim entirely. Dreams are a sticky, tar-like affair. Dreams wait patiently; dreams can kill. We sleep and turn off the real world, but its reprieve offers no rest. Dreams dwell among the uncanny, the images of our loved ones or the places where we’ve felt safe, but nostalgia is in distant lands; this time, these figures are haunted: eyeless mothers and children with black spewing from their gaping mouths. These dream places and figments are just masks for some darkness lurking behind it – an inevitable malady. Sleep is not safe.
Capturing an audio darkness better than most, the woefully underrated Rorcal has created something new for each release: mammoth post-metal (Myrra, Mordvynn, Marayaa), suffocating sludge (Heliogabalus), fiery grind (Világvége), shuddering black metal (Creon), and sprawling industrial drone (Muladona). The Swiss collective has retained that shadow within them, however, making each iteration another vision of the void. In 2024’s Silence, we saw a more streamlined approach: a blackened hardcore backbone fleshed out by skin and muscle of drone and sludge. It was a tad disjointed, but its eerie approach to hardcore nabbed the second spot on my Albums o’ the Year. Mahre is three years in the making, toning down the drone and the hardcore for ritualistic doom and post-metal in a sonic exploration of dreams as disease. If unease is your drink of choice, Rorcal will be a dreamland.
Rorcal’s song construction has always been extremely calculated even among their already intricate contemporaries (Amenra, Bolt Gun, Fall of Efrafa), and this has made them all the more terrifying. Rorcal addresses the disjointed nature of Silence in Mahre while significantly toning down the hardcore influences, offering five movements to a common descent into a darker and darker ritual through meditative, suffocating sprawls and pulsing percussion. Focusing on atmosphere, the drone influence is likewise diminished in favor of dissonant atmospheres punctuated by punishing attacks. Each movement offers its own identity that colludes for a resounding payoff, from scathing, otherworldly dissonance and blackened blastbeats (Movement I & II), climactic sludge beatdowns recalling the late-and-unhinged Admiral Angry (III), ten-ton hammering sludge riffs (III), and chaotic derailing to reveal the capitalization of the descent into degradation (V).
Rorcal’s wherewithal to burn in calculated intensity or explode in unhinged mania is Mahre’s clearest asset. Its five-movement crescendo, while intensely planned, features plenty of breath across its tidy forty minutes, allowing these movements to crash and burn in natural deterioration. The evolution from movements I to V is not only the progression from ominous blackened dissonant atmospheres to crushing sludge weight, but also from calculation to mania. By movements IV and V, the rhythms start deteriorating, and the simmering viciousness begins to derail, and the sonic dream sickness feels more like succumbing. A descent guided by vocalist Yonni Chapatte’s manic barks and shrieks, the anchor that holds your sanity in place, the transitions from the sprawling creepy dissonance of the first two movements, the punishing centerpiece “Movement III,” to the conclusions when the rhythms start falling into disarray, are truly an experience to behold.
By the time “Movement V” closes, your mind will have been dragged to one of the darkest corners of the metalverse by one of the most premier acts to specialize in it. Mahre is remarkably clean compared to Rorcal’s catalog, toning down the drone and hardcore influences for a sound whose filth comes from placement of dissonance or sludge riffs and throat-shredding vocals – a potential point of contention among long-time fans. Recalling this year’s Aversio Humanitatis in its hypnotic dissonance and dreamlike rhythms, but second-to-none in its fusion with sludge and doom, Rorcal nevertheless remains one of the most prolific acts in extreme metal, each iteration feeling uniquely theirs despite wild stylistic differences. Their sixth full-length is pitch-black and unrelenting in ways that only its creators could do. The Swiss collective has created a dreamland that feels infected, contagious, and terrifying, and you’d be foolhardy to sleep on Mahre.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 11 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Humus Records
Websites: rorcal.bandcamp.com | rorcal.com | facebook.com/Rorcal
Releases Worldwide: September 25th, 2026
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