From the tender age of 16, HL has led an ever-rotating ensemble of beautifully damaged traveling companions on a seemingly endless journey into a hazy abyss where lo-fi, depressive black metal and druggy, psychedelic art rock make for strangely sensual bedmates.
Beginning life as a ramshackle but haunting project full of tortured screams and doomy ambiance, the music soon expanded outward into a buzzing, near-perfectly blissed-out blend of raw black metal and classic indie shoegaze thrum.
Now with that particular musical blend blowing up to almost mainstream levels of success for certain bands, the group has shifted directions again, this time digging even deeper into the bizarre corners of underground music, and coming up with a sound that at times could perhaps be described as a black metal take on Japanese rock weirdos Acid Mothers Temple. Or it could just be the next logical evolutionary step in the development of one of the most surrealist bands of our time.
Either way, the combination of black metal buzz, shoegaze warmth, delicate, finger picked acoustics, jazz-flecked drums, post-rock structures, and tripped out vocals serve as the canvas on which HL paints his most heartbreaking personal work to date. A story of friends and family lost to overdose, suicide and mental illness, of memories that haunt the mind like ghosts, and of a future black and bleak when held up to the image of a Technicolor past.
The critically acclaimed album now available for sale.
" If Acid Mothers Temple threw on an old Burzum tape and smoked some hash whilst clad in faded Katatonia shirts, they might end up writing something like this once the smoke cleared."
-Kim Kelly, Noisey
"A couple releases onward and it’s safe to say that Dhampyr’s growth has not hindered its progress and, if anything, has allowed the project to truly stand upright like the vast terror it has always had the potential to be."
-Black Metal and Brews
"The addition of these two new musicians has done little to temper H.L.'s singular black metal vision, and Oceanclots is a fitting new entry into his dauntingly vast and eccentric discography."
-Shayne Mathis, Metal Injection
"Messed up black metal… Limited edition cassette comes with seashells and a tiny baggie filled with small bones and false teeth? Don’t miss out on that fun."
-Invisible Oranges
"Oceanclots, as well as the Dhampyr catalogue as a whole, was never meant to be over produced and sound super clean. The frailty adds to the overall atheistic of the record and works in spades. Dhampyr may have only been around for about eight years, but it is clear H.L knows the sound he wants, and executes it to great results."
-Neill Bird, The Metal Observer
"This enormous cavernous eerie and depressive experience just isn't something you should miss."
-Dire Notes
"This sense of personal loss and how grief can disconnect one is summed up in the track title ‘What Blessed Springs pass me by’ it seems to capture the way in which one can be all consumed in grief and loss and completely miss out on current passing moments."
- Dave Barnard, Inhale The Heavy
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