Album Review: Eowa - The Year Without a Summer

 Album Review 

Artist: Eowa

The Year Without a Summer

Release Date: August, 15, 2025

(Originally self released 2023)

Matriarch Records 

Score 8/10 

Review by Rick Eaglestone 

Let me be straight with you from the off: Eowa's "The Year Without a Summer" isn't what you'd expect from a title that immediately conjures images of Tambora's 1815 eruption and the climatic catastrophe that followed. This isn't some dry historical treatise or romanticized period piece. What we have here is something far more visceral and, frankly, more honest about the darkness that pervades human experience when the natural world turns hostile.

The project, emerging from the Peak District's windswept edges, feels appropriately positioned geographically. There's something about that landscape—those brooding moors and industrial scars—that lends itself to the kind of atmospheric weight Eowa channels throughout this work. 

This is narrative work, just told through different means. Where a novelist might spend pages building atmosphere through description, Eowa achieves the same effect in the opening minutes of "Under the Red Sun"—that seven-minute opener that feels like watching civilization slowly choke on volcanic ash.

The genius here lies in the conceptual framework. Rather than simply appropriating the historical event for dramatic effect, Eowa uses 1816's climatic disaster as a lens through which to examine contemporary environmental anxiety. This isn't nostalgia; it's prophecy. The blood-red skies and failed harvests of two centuries ago feel uncomfortably relevant when you're living through record-breaking heatwaves and catastrophic flooding.

"The Blighted," the album's second track, strips away any remaining romantic notions about humanity's relationship with nature. The vocals—when they emerge from the instrumental maelstrom—carry the weight of genuine despair. Not the performative darkness that plague so much extreme music, but something that feels earned. This is what it sounds like when the natural world stops cooperating, when the basic assumptions about seasonal patterns and agricultural cycles simply collapse.

Structurally, the work demonstrates remarkable restraint. At six tracks, it resists the bloated tendencies that sink so many conceptual albums. Each piece serves the larger narrative without overstaying its welcome. The production, deliberately raw but not amateurish, preserves the essential brutality while maintaining enough clarity to let the melodic elements breathe. And yes, there are melodic elements—unexpected moments of beauty that make the surrounding darkness hit harder by contrast.

What strikes me most about "The Year Without a Summer" is its refusal to offer easy consolation. There's no redemptive arc here, no suggestion that human ingenuity will ultimately triumph over natural catastrophe. This is literature in sonic form—complex, challenging, and uncomfortably prescient. Eowa understands that sometimes the most honest response to civilizational fragility is not hope, but witness.

You can hear echoes of early Darkthrone in the guitar work, traces of Blut Aus Nord's atmospheric innovation, even hints of post-rock dynamics borrowed from the likes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. But these elements are metabolized rather than merely copied, transformed into something distinctly contemporary.

For those willing to engage with challenging art—and make no mistake, this is art as much as entertainment—"The Year Without a Summer" offers rewards that more conventional music simply cannot provide. It's the kind of work that reveals new depths on repeated listening, that changes depending on your mood and the world's current state of crisis.

Eowa has crafted something genuinely unsettling here—not through cheap shock tactics or manufactured controversy, but through the patient accumulation of atmospheric dread. This is what it sounds like when the sun doesn't shine, when crops fail, when the basic rhythms of existence become unreliable. It's a soundtrack for our current moment of environmental uncertainty, disguised as historical reflection.