"Akhlys come from a place located deep in one’s subconscious, where all the dreaded magnificence of nightmares dwell and where those little horrors awaken, writhe and seethe, coiling their wicked tongues around your throat and dragging their splintered nails down your spinal column to force your body to quake violently at the unseen. Akhlys is a state of mind, an emotion in audial form… the unbearable fear your mind conjures when you’re at your most vulnerable, turning you into a sweat-drenched husk beneath the sheets. It is a waking, living nightmare made flesh.
In real-world terms Akhlys is the sleep deprived child of esoteric musician Naas Alcameth, whose name you may know from premier band and ceremonial black metallers Nightbringer. Akhlys may not be as familiar to you as Nightbringer are and that’s perhaps down to only unleashing one straight-up black metal album a whole five years previous, 2015’s lauded blast of evil The Dreaming I, which was preceded by 2009’s dark ambient album Supplication. Now, after some uncertainty of the continuation of the band Akhlys have returned from the shadow realm more defined, more visceral and louder than ever with brand new creation Melinoë. Such a fright-filled audial abomination requires an immersive and claustrophobic atmosphere to listen in and a totally different reviewing approach."
"Melinoë invites justified hyperbole. It’s a pantheon of plagued visions, a specter of chaos whose depth extends beyond the realm of the waking. There’s a mass that begs the flexing of auditory muscles to appreciate the swath of swirling shapes. Most of those shapes are demons competing to drag souls deeper into the nightmare. AKHLYS summarizes their record as, “From the gates of slumber, where succubi perch betwixt wakefulness and dream, to the dark lands beyond, where nightmare daemons and the gods of terror preside, Melinoë serves as noctuary, hymnal and sojourn.” Bluntly, AKHLYS delivers a dense, punchy, horror show of atmospheric black metal."
