The broad spectrum of black metal encompasses many subgenres – 1st wave, 2nd wave, raw, symphonic, atmospheric, post – and the list goes on. One spot in the black metal sphere, without a large sample size or a large audience, is black metal hip-hop. Sure, a few artists come to mind: Ghostemane, for example. Then there’s what Zeal & Ardor do, as well as Déhà’s project NADDDIR, which blends flashes of black metal with trap beats and cloud rap.
Into the ashtray tosses his slip, so to speak, the mysterious Berliner Foghazer with his debut on Hypnotic Dirge, He Left the Temple, an album consisting of nine single-word tracks that together spell “‘He’ ‘Left’ ‘The’ ‘Temple’ ‘And’ ‘Fog’ ‘Followed’ ‘Him’ ‘Out'”, and are described by the artist as “a low-visibility sound: slow tempos, distorted memory and fog as space and emotion”. Will Foghazer open the gates to a new sub-sub-genre, or will he just be one more one-man band living in a basement and emerging from his parents’ lowest “temple” in a fog of cannabis smoke and lo-fi melodies in search of treats.
If Moderator and Portishead came out flawless and “dirtied up” Burzum in some no-tell motel, the result of that union would sound like Foghazer. Avoiding almost all vocals, He Left the Temple uses trip-hop drum beats with occasional blasts and jazz fills, melancholy-smooth bass lines and otherworldly plucked or Filosofem-leaved guitars dipped in reverb to armor most of their sonic palette. Add some rough, Portishead-style turntablism, operatic chirps of a female soprano, Master Boot Record-style bleepity-bloops (“He,” “Followed”) among other random sounds, and you have the essence of what’s happening here. He Left the Temple strikes a respectable cinematic chord, evoking a lo-res film noir experience that, at least in the movie that comes to my mind, follows Foghazer and his crew of corpse-painted black metal beatniks as they wander the hard streets of an “any town” looking for trouble.
Loose and bleak, Foghazer builds a lovely atmosphere. He Left the Temple would serve just as well as a lounge-lizard soundtrack playing endlessly in a moody, urban underground bar with cigars and whiskey as it would as music for some black metal remake of Werner Herzog’s Kids. “Left” has a slow, otherworldly structure that shifts from chilling, unique guitar pieces to a rolling double-bass foundation supporting some fine, melodic riff patterns. “Fog” is another standout. Its trippy bass line and trap rhythms trade punches with passages of doomy tremolo and double-bass rolls, and made me think, “this is how Darkthrone would sound if they tried something like this”. There were many moments where I found myself slipping comfortably into the groove Foghazer laid down, my head rolling through Oslo with my deluded hearse at full power. Unfortunately, not all the fog in the temple covers me fully.
There’s a dark thread of similarity running through almost all of He Left the Temple that influenced my overall experience. Foghazer rinses and repeats his compositional formula so that, if you were to skip through the first five seconds of each track from “He” to “Fog”, each begins the same way, which as a whole has a hypnotic effect that distances you from what’s happening rather than drawing you in. I kept checking the track number at times to see if I’d accidentally played the same song again. The other drawback I have to lay at He Left the Temple’s feet is when Foghazer leans further into his black metal. “Temple” is the most glaring example of this, as it starts thoughtfully, with some melancholy bass tones and delicate guitar pieces before landing on the trip-hop beat section, which is rudely interrupted at 1:25 by an annoying blast beat that pulses constantly beneath those chilling guitars. This track also contains Foghazer’s only vocals, which, for us, are a blessing in themselves, since I find his particular kind of scream rather harsh.
There are some nice things on He Left the Temple, but it isn’t something that will put Foghazer on the map. I appreciate the groove and atmosphere he can create at times, but as a mainly instrumental album, the lack of any added dynamics left me wanting more from Foghazer. As things stand, He Left the Temple offers an entertaining musical backdrop, but nothing more.
Rating: 2.5/5.0
Label: Hypnotic Dirge Records
Websites: Bandcamp | Releases Instagram worldwide: March 27, 2026
