A Certain Taste

  For the uninitiated, Fen have spent the better part of twenty years turning a very specific patch of England into a sound. Named after the Fens – the flat, mist-bound wetlands of eastern England where the band’s roots lie – they emerged in 2006 as standard-bearers of British atmospheric black metal, fusing the cold fury of the genre with the widescreen melancholy of post-rock and the shimmer of what would later be badged blackgaze. Comparisons to Agalloch dogged them early; they even toured with the Americans. But Fen long ago earned the right to be measured on their own terms, and across records like Carrion Skies and Winter they built a body of work as bleak and beautiful as the landscape that inspired it. Their last outing, 2023’s Monuments to Absence, was the sound of a band pressing hard on the accelerator – dense, fast, unrelenting. Mourning Earth deliberately eases off. This is Fen returning to first principles, giving their songs room to breathe, and letting ideas unfur...