GAEREA’s fourth album, Coma, out now via Season of Mist, delivers a bleak journey through extreme metal’s borders, mixing styles with haunting precision. Gone is the singular vision of their earlier works; instead, Coma evolves into a labyrinth of black metal, deathcore, metalcore, and touches of dreamlike atmosphere.
As Gaerea themselves admit, this record has them “letting go,” reaching beyond the brutal edges of their past, and exploring the mystery of the unknown.
Where their previous Mirage album grappled with structure, Coma shatters it, finding beauty in collapse. “Hope Shatters,” a blistering lead track, wraps chaotic tremolo picking around a suspended melody that feels like a breath before drowning. As the band explained to New Noise Magazine, “It’s an extreme album. It’s us. It sounds like us.” Coma is both surreal and urgent, each track a testament to Gaerea’s relentless transformation and refusal to settle into genre confines.
True to its name, Coma is unnerving, suspended between worlds. Gaerea captures that experience of being trapped within, somewhere between lucidity and the terrifying unknown. “This album is about loose ideas, fantasies, and a kind of ethereal state,” Gaerea shares. “We always play around with imagination…it’s still a very human record, rooted in the urban and real.”
