Beannachd Leibh
Canada · last active 2025
Beannachd Leibh is the Toronto solo project of Alec McKay (formerly recording as Crux), pairing melody-driven black metal in the vein of Blut Aus Nord with the twisting, prog-damaged structures of Kayo Dot and Time of Orchids. Debut full-length Walking in His Works (2025) stretches songs past nine minutes, mixing blasting extremity with symphonic passages and near-hallucinatory melodic detours. It's black metal built for patience — technically dense and unwilling to settle into a single mode for long.
SCORE PROFILE
Accent numbers counted towards the index. Hover an axis — or hold it on a phone — for what it means.
WHY THOSE SCORES
- Death 2 — No Clean Singing notes 'frequent dives into brutality' within the black-metal core.
- Black 7 — Bandcamp/press tag it black metal; No Clean Singing cites 'blasting drums' and 'scalding screams' on Walking in His Works.
- Technical 6 — No Clean Singing: 'technically dense arrangements that constantly keep you guessing,' citing Kayo Dot and Time of Orchids as touchstones.
- Glitch 1 — Bandcamp genre tags for Walking in His Works include 'electronic' alongside black/death metal.
- Theatrical 4 — No Clean Singing describes 'symphonic grandeur and classically inclined elegance.'
- Doom 1 — Songs stretch to 9-14 minutes with slow builds per the tracklist, though not riff-doom in the classic sense.
- Drone 1 — Extended 14-minute title track suggests sustained sections, though unconfirmed in detail.
- Shoegaze 2 — Cites melody-focused Blut Aus Nord as a direct influence, a band known for shoegaze-adjacent atmospheric black metal (Bandcamp bio).
- Ambient 3 — No Clean Singing: 'near-hallucinatory melodicism.'
MEMBERS
- Alec McKay (AJM)all instruments, vocals, cover art, recording
FURTHER LISTENING
Nearest score profiles in the atlas.
- Blackgaze / avant-blackEI 4LengselsatelliteBlackTechnicalAmbient
Lengsel are a Norwegian progressive/avant-garde 'unblack' metal band formed in 1995, whose 2000 debut Solace won a following for its atmospheric, experimental take on black metal. The band is tightly bound to Extol: guitarist Tor Magne Glidje joined Extol in 1999 (first on bass, later guitar) and, over time, all three Lengsel members became members of Extol. The overlap left Lengsel a largely studio-bound project.
- Dissonant tech-deathEI 12Dark FortressBlackTechnicalTheatrical
Dark Fortress were a melodic black metal band from Landshut, Germany, active from 1994 until their May 2023 disbandment, known for atmosphere-heavy concept albums such as Seance (2006) and Eidolon (2008), released through Century Media. Longtime guitarist V. Santura (with the band 2001-2023) also served as Celtic Frost's touring guitarist during that band's 2006-2008 live reunion, before co-founding Tom G. Fischer's post-Celtic Frost band Triptykon. Later lineups included drummer Hannes Grossmann (ex-Obscura, ex-Necrophagist).
- UnaffiliatedEI 14SmohallaBlackTechnicalAmbient
French duo led by multi-instrumentalist Slo (guitars/drums/vocals/keys) with bassist Camille Giraudeau, playing avant-garde/progressive post-black metal descended from Emperor, Ulver, Borknagar and Ved Buens Ende. After a 12-year gap between albums, 2025's Ruina Draconis (I, Voidhanger) piles on 'extremely layered', ambient-electronic interludes between bursts of blackened violence. Giraudeau's parallel work in Dødheimsgard's touring lineup, Doedsmaghird, Stagnant Waters and Void ties Smohalla directly into the same avant-black/noise diaspora.
- UnaffiliatedEI 9JunonBlackTechnicalTheatrical
Junon is a German psychedelic black metal project whose debut LP The Golden Citadel of the Astral Sphere (2026, I, Voidhanger Records) warps second-wave black metal through avant-garde songwriting and a vocal performance that swings from shrieks to operatic wails to laughter. Bandcamp credits it as uniting musicians who have spent decades in bands like Hidden in the Fog, Imha Tarikat, and Temple Koludra, though press coverage instead frames it as a single artist's solo vehicle — individual identities remain undisclosed either way.
- UnaffiliatedEI 11EscarreBlackTechnicalTheatrical
A Montreal avant-garde black metal trio whose 2015 album 'Une voûte sans clef' has been described by reviewers as a terrifying, exhilarating merger of black metal and circus music — cinematic, synth-layered black metal that lurches between harsh blast passages and eerie, carnivalesque calm. Roots trace back to the black metal project Esker before the 2015 rename.
- Blackgaze / avant-blackEI 15Angst SkvadronBlackTechnicalTheatrical
Angst Skvadron was a Norwegian avant-garde/post-black metal project formed in 2008 by Trond Bråthen (Trondr Nefas, also of Urgehal, Kvist, and In Lingua Mortua), fusing early-90s black metal with 70s progressive rock around a recurring alien-invasion concept. Core collaborator Lars Fredrik Frøislie (drums, keyboards, mellotron, minimoog) helped build the project's spacey, synth-laden atmosphere across the Flukt (2008) and Sweet Poison (2010) full-lengths on Agonia Records, with Octavia Marina Petru contributing vocals, Tibetan singing bowls, and vocoder. Bråthen died in 2012, and the project's status is listed as split-up.
- UnaffiliatedEI 13Echo ZeroBlackTechnicalAmbient
Echo Zero is a Kraków project that debuted in 2026 with "E0," a concept album about an antenna recovered from the Arctic Ocean floor — "the first rung of Jacob's Ladder" — released on Pest Productions. No Clean Singing folded the band into Poland's long tradition of weird black metal, praising its mind-warping ambient stretches, groove-heavy riffs, prowling bass, and "constantly-mutating" multi-tongued vocal performance that never lets the strangeness dull the aggression. The project is led by IHS (Patryk Rzeszutek, aka Faustyna IHS Moreau), also the mainman of atlas act Biesy.
- Norwegian avant-blackEI 9Shining (Sweden)BlackTechnicalTheatrical
Shining is a Swedish depressive/suicidal black metal band formed by Niklas Kvarforth in 1996 — a genuinely distinct entity from the atlas's Norwegian blackjazz Shining (shining-norway). Musically it is rooted in DSBM with early doom influences, gradually adopting clean guitars, solos and odd meters as it drifted toward progressive extreme metal, its avant-garde credentials thinner than most atlas nodes. Its most 'experimental' dimension is arguably Kvarforth's notorious confrontational stagecraft (self-mutilation, razor-blade distribution). Personnel overlap with Mayhem and Arcturus is significant.
- UnaffiliatedEI 14HasardBlackTechnicalTheatrical
Hasard is a French dissonant/avant-garde black metal project by the musician Hazard, an offshoot of his prior orchestral/classical one-man project Les Chants du Hasard. Debut album Malivore (I, Voidhanger Records, 2023) inverts that project's formula, building chaotic, dissonant black metal shot through with classical/orchestral flourishes, piano guest work from John Steven Morgan of Wreche, and comparisons to early Ævangelist, Abyssal and Blut Aus Nord. A follow-up, Abgnose, was released in 2025, also on I, Voidhanger.
- UnaffiliatedEI 14Transcending Bizarre?BlackTechnicalTheatrical
Transcending Bizarre? are a Thessaloniki avant-garde/symphonic black metal band formed in 2000, built around guitarist Theoharis Liratzakis and keyboardist/vocalist Haris. Across three albums (The Four Scissors, 2003; The Serpent's Manifolds, 2008; The Misanthrope's Fable, 2010) they mixed icy black metal with synths, samples and a theatrical, surrealist fairy-tale aesthetic one reviewer compared to a Tim Burton soundtrack. In 2010 Liratzakis and Haris used the band as a launchpad to found Hail Spirit Noir, carrying much of Transcending Bizarre?'s eerie, keyboard-driven avant-black approach into that project.