EP Review: Lore — Psychotic Trance of the Black Nights

 EP Review 

Artist: Lore 

Title: Psychotic Trance of the Black Nights

Release Date: 22/05/2026

Label; Death Prayer Records 

Score: 8/10 

There are moments in this underground where something crawls out of the murk that feels genuinely, defiantly alive — not polished, not packaged, not angling for a Bandcamp algorithm — just four tracks of raw, obsidian intent, dripping with the kind of conviction that makes you sit up straight and pay attention. Psychotic Trance of the Black Nights, the long-awaited follow-up from UK solo black metal entity Lore, is exactly that kind of moment.

What separates Psychotic Trance of the Black Nights from the endless tide of bedroom-recorded black metal that floods the underground is a sense of genuine thematic purpose. This isn’t black metal by rote. These four tracks immerse themselves in ancient pagan mysticism, ritual darkness, and a vertiginous, almost hallucinatory obsession with the cosmic — the void not as cliché, but as felt experience. The production is deliberately raw and unpolished in the best tradition of the form, yet never so wilfully lo-fi as to sacrifice the atmosphere. There is a balance struck here between menace and melody, between primordial filth and genuine compositional intelligence, and it is that balance that elevates the record above mere genre exercise. 

The opening gambit, Astral Blood of  Dead Stars is astatement of intent. A churning, tremolo-picked wall of guitars arrives without ceremony, immediately establishing the EP’s character: purposeful, cold, and deeply atmospheric. The riffing is serpentine, winding through the mix like smoke through standing stones. Zaza’s vocals are rasping and vicious, carrying that particular quality of genuine hostility that no amount of studio trickery can manufacture. There are moments here that recall the most stripped-back and savage corners of the Darkthrone canon, yet the cosmological imagery in both the track title and the underlying mood push it somewhere distinctly Lore’s own. 

The centrepiece of the first half, and perhaps the track that best demonstrates Lore’s capacity for long-form atmosphere Neolithic Druid Burial Chamber,  At over seven minutes, this is the EP stretching its limbs, and it does so with real confidence. The title conjures an image — cold earth, ancient bone, the weight of millennia — and the music delivers on that promise entirely. There is a genuinely oppressive quality to the mid-section here, where the riffing slows just enough to become something approaching a ritual pulse, before the tremolo assault reasserts itself. This is UK black metal that knows its own landscape, its own soil, its own dead; you can hear the moorlands and the old dark places of these islands in every note. Exceptional.

The title track and, fittingly, the EP’s most hypnotic moment. Just over five and a half minutes of black metal that genuinely earns its adjective — there is a trance-inducing quality to the riff construction here that locks you in and refuses to release you. The drums pound with relentless forward momentum whilst the guitar work spirals outward in increasingly unhinged patterns. The vocal performance on this track is particularly strong, teetering on the edge of total derangement whilst maintaining enough coherence to remain compelling rather than merely chaotic. This is the track you’ll return to; the one that justifies the title and the vision.

The closing track is the EP’s final descent, Eclipsed by Celestial Portals of Psychosis - a plunge through the cosmic dark that the preceding three tracks have been steadily building toward. Lore saves its most ambitious compositional statement for last, allowing the atmosphere to breathe and expand in ways that bring the whole experience to a satisfying and deeply unsettling conclusion. The sense of dissolution is palpable; by the time the final notes ring out, the listener is left somewhere between exhausted and exhilarated, which is precisely the correct emotional destination for a record of this nature. It is a closer that makes the whole feel greater than the sum of its parts.

Psychotic Trance of the Black Nights is a thrillingly focused piece of work. In a year already crowded with worthy underground releases, this is the kind of record that reminds you why this music matters — why the underground exists, why raw black metal in the hands of someone with genuine conviction still has the power to unsettle, to transport, and to consume. Zaza has constructed something genuinely malevolent and genuinely memorable, and Death Prayer Records have given it a physical home worthy of the music it contains.

The cassette variants will sell out fast, and they should. Get on it immediately. The UK black metal scene is in rude health, and Lore are near the sharp, frostbitten end of it.