Description
Jin, Jiyan, Azadi. The debut from Kurdish black metal wraith Xwin claws its way into reality through the shattered memory of stateless struggle. Spearheaded by Turkey-based Kurdish solo artist Helin (also known as Graveyard Slut in adjacent projects such as Ash Magick, Crawling, Hellish, Hexenaught, Pseudocommando, NeolithicNihilis, etc.), the project's 2024 enigmatic debut offering loosely translates to "Blood is Washed Away With Blood", and finally sees its first ever release on physical formats. Xwin is a vector for a primordial rage instigated by perpetual exposition to historic violence and injustice, and a grim byproduct of systemic oppression perpetrated over centuries. The chaos of black metal is thus used as a conduit for fringe cultural resistance, and brought into a dialogue with Kurdish history to voice a struggle that has survived to the present in stories and experiences passed through generations, especially from the tradition of the Dengbejs. A corpse-like blown out production, vomitous vocals, diseased atmospheres, and sulfuric riffs laced with poison collapse into a terrorizing, assaultive audial enigma influenced by acts like Streams of Blood, Urgehal, Arckanum, Tortorum and Dark Sonority, and envisioned to hurl complete vice unto reality. Unrestrained misanthropy, isolationism, and scrappy home-recording tactics digressing into the outer realms of industrial noise and power electronics, revive the ancestral integralism of black metal, transforming stories of struggle and oppression into a gnarled, weaponized, and insurgent form lone wolf raw black metal warfare instigated into existence by centuries of anger and suffering.
