The Heretic – Midnight Mass

The Heretic started as a solo project of Stephan Larsen (who’s responsible for all the guitars, bass, vocal, drum programming) in 2020. However the idea for this project has been in the making for years. According the the only protagonist, the aforementioned Stephan, ‘the idea for The Heretic was to make some doomy heavy rock dealing with themes on horror, the occult and all things dark and obscure’. It’s not surprising that Mr. Larsen has chosen to look back at the time when heavy rock/metal was dangerous and then embarked on a once occult and doomed hard rock.

Midnight Mass is his debut mini album released on cassette just recently. All songs from Midnight Mass are written and composed through the years 2020 and 2021. It consists of six tracks (three on each side of the cassette), clocking in at 32 minutes, displaying some of the finest songwriting yet to come from this one-man stoner doom band. It definitely retains that unfiltered sense of unique rawness and old-school DIY-approach that has now become synonymous with Stephan’s charismatic sound and musical identity. Structurally, Midnight Mass is quite a reasonable output. Vocals are haunted most of the time, while the guitars and bass provides these strange noises and untraditional sounds. As briefly mentioned before, drums are programmmed which results in a flat and tin drums, reminiscent of the early days of black metal.

First songs from Side A, “The Cursed Well” and from Side B, “Deep in the Forest” are somehow more similar in its mood and build-up than the rest of the songs from Midnight Mass. They both start at a dragging tempo, before solid mid-tempo groovy riffs kicks-in. Second track from Side A is the one called “My Secret Lullaby”. It’s probably the weakeast track here, containing cloudy lyrics and exhausting and sorry to say, a boring rhythm. On the opposite side we find a “The Ballade of Anton Phibes”, with its groovy riff, sounding pretty much retro, but within the framework of of his dark, Occult and stoner doom rock. “Midnight Mass” is a self-titled second song on Side B, a ritualistic doom rock anthem, pretty much representative of The Heretic’ overall sound. Then we come to the closing one entitled, “Daemones Tributum”, which almost sounds like a real Satanic ritual. A nice way to end the album.

In conclusion; the ideas are well thought through, but planned execusion is not delivered in an most effective way. Apart from thin production, which results in an uncontrolled, boomy and flabby mix, it feels as he could really benefit from including other members to the band/project, or at least for the drum task.

Midnight Mass is still loaded with six catchy down-tunes doom melodies, where The Heretic delivers a highly personal mini album with Midnight Mass. The band quotes ‘More Satan in rock music’, so if you’re into Satanic, Occult & Doom stuff, then you should give this hard-working one-man a fair chance.

For additional info on this one-man project from Løgumkloster, Denmark go to https://theheretic1.bandcamp.com/