Band: Uulliata Digir | Album: Uulliata Digir | Genre: Avant-garde metal | Year: 2025
From: Poznań, Poland | Label: Independent
For fans of: Neurosis, Ashenspire, Kayo Dot
My usual means of looking for music does have its blind spots. I typically search by tags on Bandcamp, but if a band doesn’t use a certain tag, I’m not going to run across their material. I try to account for these blind spots by occasionally perusing the charts on Rate Your Music and Prog Archives, but Uulliata Digir is a band I found via the comment section of a Simpsons meme on Facebook.
Uulliata Digir is a Polish sextet based out of Poznań, and their self-titled debut is a strange and striking record. It has a swirling, lurching rhythm, and the atmosphere is often hazy and ritualistic. Upon my first listen, it reminded me a lot of Solar Drone Ceremony. This is far from drone, but that occultic ritualism is a common bond between the two albums. Consisting of two epics, two interludes, and one song of a-bit-more-than-average length, Uulliata Digir brings the listener on an otherworldly journey.
“Myrthys” opens with a cold, echoing guitar unevenly strumming out unusual chords. Rolling drums buoy this opening passage as the guitar grows heavier and heavier. Trumpet, a key element of this band’s music, makes an appearance early on, slowly bleating out a lead melody. The band’s male vocalist growls and snarls his lyrics, and the female vocalist chants hers as if she were some alien priestess performing a religious rite. The contrast between harsh and clean vocals is powerful and striking.
Things quiet back down in the midsection, with trumpet taking the lead over wobbly, askew jazz chords and deft percussion. Sounds pan between the left and right channels, adding to the disorientation of it all. Doom metal influences emerge as the percussion all but halts and a downward throb of distortion acts as this passage’s underpinning. Things remain in flux, however, as this moment is soon replaced by something more frenzied and ecstatic.
The final few minutes of this epic revisit its opening. The vocals alternate between gentle chanting and primal screams, and the music escalates into a powerful climax of leaden guitars, piercing trumpet, and droning vocals.
Following the brief interlude “Asea”, “Omni Dirga” opens with one guitar chord ringing out over and over before plunging into blackened, avant-garde madness. That opening guitar pattern is frequently revisited between bouts of chaos, giving this piece a sense of grounding. When the trumpet enters, it gives everything a woozy, uneven feel, and this band’s avant-garde jazz influences are at their most apparent. The two vocalists chant “Uulliata” over and over, their voices frenzied and intense. This repetition of a (seeming) nonsense word only adds to the esoteric appeal of this record.
One more interlude, the spoken-word “Atti”, leads us into the “Eldrvari”, the closing epic. This one is a bit slower to get going, utilizing abstract blobs of distortion. Clearer riffs soon emerge, though, utilizing punchy, impactful guitar tones and thumping percussion. This pattern is counterbalanced by dreamier, wandering jazzy flourishes that call to mind moments on “Lizard”, if “Lizard” were a metal song.
More ritualistic chanting breaks up the band’s twisting guitar passages, and the repetition of these passages continues to underscore the Zen-like qualities of this record.
Uulliata Digir’s self-titled debut is an impressive work. It weaves together the occult and enigmatic trappings of an alien rite with music that alternates between gritty, grounded metal and ethereal, otherworldly jazz. The songs lurch and swell and ebb and flow in organic and surprising ways, and the whole experience is exciting and enthralling.
Score: 87/100
The Elite Extremophile 