Long has there been a relationship between extreme metal music and mental illness with the results of such a relationship still able to be witnessed even to today. It’s the sort of intertwined destiny that has always allowed the tormented to try and bring their suffering to life through aural catharsis such that listeners can share in on the suffering and connect with the artist in such a form that few other mediums are able to achieve. Tapping into that dark splendor, it’s with their eponymous debut that Sleep Paralysis more than lives up to its name with black metal that is sharp, biting, and unpredictable.

This is black metal that is just not simply so. Rather than taking the sound and then birthing a concept that can fit within the genre boundaries such that a purveyor of the genre can find the correlation relatively easily, Sleep Paralysis seems to have gone about things the other way around. Seeking a disjointed journey through a truly tormented mind that is plagued by terror and mental illnesses that many of us are far too familiar with, it would be a gross understatement to say that Sleep Paralysis is simply black metal. Never once afraid to approach things from outside-of-the-box like demonstrating a sinister skill with the piano that truly knows how to get under your skin and feed into your darkest and most irrational fears, this is a debut that opens a world of possibilities for this already promising name. Constantly leaping across genre lines to make this a surprisingly fluid work that taps into the worlds of jazz, electronica, and so much more to take this far beyond the work of only extreme metal, Sleep Paralysis is a horrifically organic experience that draws from the deepest recesses of the human psyche to deliver an experience that isn’t just a figure of speech but, rather, an entity of true darkness that cannot be denied once it worms its way into your very being.

It has been the goal of many acts in the fringes of extreme metal to bring about primal terror that one cannot ignore lest the threat grow ever greater in the shadows, and few have been able to deliver anything close to what Sleep Paralysis has managed to achieve in its self-titled creation. The sort of foundational effort that one can truly build anything from to make for a wild creation that holds nothing back in any form whatsoever, the very night and all of its mysterious horrors come to life in exquisite form within these eleven annals of psychological torment.

“Sleep Paralysis” releases on February 28th via I, Voidhanger Records!

LISTEN to an advanced track from “Sleep Paralysis” on Bandcamp here.