Well, friends — so concludes another week. And one of the busiest and more stressful in recent memory; or at least it was for me. How are you all doing? Before I sign out of here and go pass out for the entire weekend, I’d like to share some new music with you. Well, some brand-new and some slightly less-new.

Did you hear Syrup Moose Records is back? They’ve started grinding out the albums again for 2026, and today marks the release of the second full-length by a Kansas Citian one-piece band whose debut LP was one of SMR‘s earliest output, almost exactly three years ago.

 

Tide Harvester – Palemoon Spelltone (Syrup Moose Records, 07 April 2023)

 

Tide Harvester – Triumph of the Dragon-God (Syrup Moose Records, 27 March 2026)

 

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Tide Harvester‘s Palemoon Spelltone, whose ten tracks weigh in at right around an hour in length, starts off with a gentle and ethereal synth sound, very dungeon synth-esque. This simple melody continues repeating throughout opener “The Betrayal of the Sun” as it gradually adds layer after layer of heavily distorted guitar, drums and bass, and finally tortuously howled vocals, all blended together in an amalgam of blackness and sorrow.

This juxtaposition of pretty synth melodies against ugly blackened grittiness carries throughout the album. That first track and later song “The Destruction of the Spire of Knowledge” are each followed by a shorter instrumental interlude — “The One Who Shall Guide Us to Damnation” on piano and “The One Who Shall Guide Us to Salvation” in a more traditional dungeon synth arrangement — which in both cases is built upon a similar melodic phrase to the one featured in the preceding song.

Sometimes slow and gloomy and doomy, but more often at a typically furious black metal pacing, synth leads either mournful or hopeful combine with raw guitars that tend to sound ultra-distorted, like during the mixing process what bleeds through is almost entirely the “wet” signal, or the processed noise, with very little of the actual underlying instrument sound.

 

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Today’s new release Triumph of the Dragon-God, slightly shorter at eight tracks, forty-five minutes, starts off with some clean(-ish) strummed guitar chords, before exploding into another wall-of-sound. Blackened distorted guitar layers upon a bass-heavy rhythm section, raspy howled vocals buried underneath, calm and serene synth leads hanging out on top.

This all may feel familiar: prominent synth melodies backed with filthy raw noise. Structurally, this album seems rather unique, however. Where its predecessor had a few examples of brief interlude tracks following in the footsteps of a longer song, Triumph alternates a piano piece after each track. “Prelude to Warfare,” “Prelude to Resurrection,” “Prelude to Ruination,” and “Finality” are each intriguing piano etudes that are clearly meant to be paired with their respective lead-in tracks, since each interlude track runs precisely two minutes and forty-six seconds, although the musical portion of most of the tracks is somewhat shorter, leaving a bit of a gap before the following track resumes. Whether that specific length of time or that number bears some significance is unclear, but formatting in this manner definitely delineates the album into a quartet of pairs, highlighting even further the juxtaposition between the ugly, dirty blackness and its lovely, melodic counterpart.

 

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Palemoon Spelltone can be procured here, while Triumph of the Dragon-God is available right over here.
 

 

Tide Harvester: Bandcamp
Syrup Moose: website | Bandcamp | Ampwall