There’s a well somewhere in Finland with a dead child at the bottom of it. At least that’s how Birching tell it — a black metal band from Turku, barely a year old, who dropped their first demo on February 5, with basically no mythology around themselves. Just four tracks recorded at the turn of 2025 and 2026, during the kind of Finnish darkness that doesn’t really end.
Birching is Saarnaaja on vocals and his ensemble: SM on guitar, LH on bass, and MH on drums. The project was founded in 2024, and according to the band, this release is where they locked in what they actually sound like.
“With this release, the band refined its form and sound,” they note — hence the stripped-back title. No need for a grand name when the stuff speaks for itself.
What makes this thing interesting is how seriously they take the writing behind it. Saarnaaja frames it almost philosophically: “What I make becomes my master. To create together is to solidify what has emerged.” There’s no irony there. He describes music itself as existing in “an in-between state — not dead or alive.” That kind of thinking runs through the whole demo — not as pretension, but as a foundation. “There are no mistakes in our music,” he adds. “Without a predetermined pulse.”
The anonymity is intentional. No faces, no bios, just initials and one vocalist name that translates roughly to “preacher.” They clearly want the songs to do the talking.
And those songs are bleak. “Kaivoon unohdettu” is described by the band as “pure fiction — a little horror story about the priest and his bastard child. There is a well and some drowning. Bottom line, god’s servants are only humans.” Cold, direct, no dressing it up. “Kalman entinen eläjä” goes deeper — Saarnaaja says there are “so many different levels and symbols” in the track, touching on Finnish mythology, but that “basically the whole song is a kind of curse.”
“Horros” is the most personal of the four. The band describes it simply as “memories from a personally experienced evocation ritual.” No elaboration. No context beyond that. Take it or leave it.
The closer, “Oman kohtalon seppä,” was born from a dream Saarnaaja had a couple of years ago. “Past and present define us,” he says. “Who we are, what makes us? Time changes but everlasting darkness will always be there.” It’s a line that could easily sound overwrought from another band, but coming from a project this minimal and deliberate, it just reads like a statement of fact.
“This is a true story,” the band writes in the opening line of their notes that we exchanged. Whether that’s literal or something closer to a dare, Birching clearly aren’t interested in performing black metal as a costume. They treat it like a rite — sparse, cold, and dead serious.
Stream “Demo” on Bandcamp and Spotify.
