DIGICD。波兰黑金属，2024年新专辑。

"Stella Pandora", the impassioned and anthemic 8th album from ARKONA, finds the formidable Polish Black Metal pioneers supremely focused, superbly intense and aflame with melodic vigour.

Since their 1993 formation ARKONA have progressively fine-tuned and elevated their sound, and this follow-up to 2019's acclaimed "Age of Capricorn" advances the band further still, as they imbue each phrase with a sense of existential yearning - a wistful awareness of the past dying inside the present.

Powered by a watertight rhythm-section, the band create sweeping and elegiac arrangements of neo-classical, folk-infused vehemence. Windswept and elemental leads, textural orchestrations and pitch-perfect storytelling from cruel, anguished vocals propel emotive Black Metal of the highest quality.

Conceptually, "Stella Pandora" examines the inevitability of death and the pointlessness of fighting against human destiny: when faith is but a shell aimed at manipulation, myth becomes the only truth in the senselessness of existence.