Paimon Gate – Advanced Satanic Witchcraft(2025)

Paimon Gate is Jake Kohn of Prosanctus Inferi’s solo project. The band’s first full-length sees them perfecting the esoteric brand of American black metal hinted at on the first two releases. Codified within the norms of bedroom projects yet driven by a very purposeful vision that enhances the work, Advanced Satanic Witchcraft offers us some of the most unique black metal to ever emerge from the USBM scene.

The first two releases, Seven Legions and Butcher to the Devil’s Court, still retained the death metal influence that defines American black metal, contrasted with bursts of melody that felt closer to the Norwegian black metal style. On Advanced Satanic Witchcraft, the focus has completely shifted to those melodies while eschewing, for the most part, the more aggressive elements. The songs, instead of relying on those harsh contrasts, focus on long and ambiguous melodies and developing them throughout the course of a song in a purely narrative style.

Aesthetically, this doesn’t attempt to be raw in the conventional sense but fully embraces the possibilities imbued via digital production. A large number of layered and distorted vocals meet an obvious yet loud drum machine as the perfect backdrop for the guitar melodies that completely dominate the mix. Those drums and vocals are primarily there to accentuate the evolutions of those melodies, with bursts of screams whenever there is a transition that work almost like a secondary percussion instrument. The drums obey the whims of the guitar and stick to a set of classic patterns that are there only to reinforce the emotional impact of those melodies, like halfway through “From Womb to Cauldron,” when the drums switch to an incredibly fast double bass pattern to emphasize the building tension before slowing down for the song’s emotional climax.

The melodies are built on fairly exotic modes that make discerning the emotional quality somewhat difficult at first, but the length and unexpected twists and turns that these melodies go through before changing make the wait worth it. While all these melodies sound interesting in isolation, it’s their relationship to each other that makes this album so unique. “Black Wicker and Baby Fat” really highlights this with cycles of ambiguous riffs that slowly build by getting slightly more dissonant before settling on a slower conclusion that almost sounds like a classic black metal breakdown but still keeps enough of its ambiguous nature to really stand out. Pretty much all these melodies are presented as single-note tremolo picking, with the only variation being tempo and the picking patterns, but because the songs adhere strictly to a narrative, this only works to improve the album. The fact that the melodies are ambiguous but the song structures are clearly defined gives this album the “witchy” esoteric quality that the song titles point to, as these melodies flow seamlessly together while twisting and harmonizing in bizarre yet satisfying ways that feel like the listener is being guided through the terrifying ritual of an obscure cult.

Advanced Satanic Witchcraft stands out as an exemplary black metal album not because it seeks to subvert the expectations of the USBM subgenre for the sake of nonconformity, but rather uses it as a base to create its own vision that borrows equally from what has been an opposing subgenre in the Norwegian black metal style, not with the aim of reconciling both styles, but as a tool to express something original that stands on its own two feet in a genre that struggles to renew itself without resorting to gimmicks or mashups between other bands. Paimon Gate have released a very strong contender for album of the year and show that black metal is still a genre with many untapped possibilities.