Wazzara Unveils Fourth Album ‘Arbor’

With Arbor, Swiss atmospheric black metal, doom and blackgaze project Wazzara return after five years with an album that feels less like a comeback than a descent into an older, darker world. Across its seven songs, the band cultivate an intriguing tension between heaviness and transcendence, allowing abrasive guitars, funereal weight and expansive ambience to exist in uneasy but compelling harmony. There is a distinctly elemental quality to the record: Arbor seems fascinated by things buried beneath the surface, by forces that remain dormant only until the right moment to break through.

The album’s strength lies in its patience. Rather than treating atmosphere as ornamental, Wazzara make it central to the compositions, letting riffs emerge from haze and allowing passages to develop with a hypnotic inevitability. Tracks such as “Hollow” and “Her Ashes Down The River” inhabit that fertile territory between black metal’s ferocity and doom’s sense of gravity, while “Indigo Sleep” introduces a more dreamlike dimension. Barbara Brawand’s vocals become another instrument within this architecture, moving through the songs with an expressive intensity that reinforces the album’s sense of ritual and unease.

There is also something particularly organic about the record’s construction. The collaboration with Romanian musician and producer Andrei Jumuga gives the drums both force and character, while the expansive mixes associated with Andy Roscyk allow Wazzara’s layers to breathe rather than collapse into density. Most strikingly, “zessa (reborn)” functions as more than a revisitation of an older composition. Transformed through years of live performance, it feels like an artefact recovered from an earlier incarnation of the band and reshaped by experience.

Ultimately, Arbor succeeds because Wazzara understand that darkness need not mean monochrome. Beauty continually grows through the album’s heavier passages, just as menace lurks beneath its more ethereal moments. It is a record concerned with transformation — with buried voices returning, roots extending into unseen places, and something ancient refusing to remain silent. Five years after their previous full-length, Wazzara have produced an album that rewards immersion rather than immediacy: strange, weighty and quietly intoxicating.