Despite the huge amount of great metal albums released this year, I’ve had my top pick locked in since all the way back in April. Otherlike Darknesses is a three-track monolith of extreme metal that transcends genre and eschews standard songwriting conventions with long-form, linear compositions that take the listener on a veritable saga through dark, mysterious realms with jagged riffs, eerie atmosphere, and polyphonic arrangements. If this album slipped under your radar amongst everything else that came out this year, this should serve as a great introduction to its creation. Felgrave‘s sole member M.L. Jupe was kind enough to answer my questions regarding the making of this incredible album, his musical background and influences, and what he hoped to accomplish with this album. Read about this and more after the jump.
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Hello and thank you for taking the time to speak to us! What is your musical background, and how did it culminate in Felgrave?
Hey, thanks for having me! I very much enjoyed the review you wrote shortly after the album release.
I’ve been writing and recording since I was 15, originally as a solo black metal project called Dead Hills (the “Purgatory/Winds of Time” release was made at age 16) with very obvious Norwegian black metal influences and later on some pretty heavy prog rock influence on the 2016 album “Gateways”.
After “Gateways” I felt the urge to make something more deathy and doomy and started writing “A Waning Light”, for which I used the new project name Felgrave (originally was going to be Automb but then a now-defunct American band swiped that one shortly after I came up with it!). On that album you can in my opinion pretty clearly hear influence from Disembowelment, The Ruins of Beverast, and Timeghoul, which was the sort of metal I was into around that time.
The jump in musicianship between 2020’s A Waning Light and Otherlike Darknesses is pretty astounding. Was this a natural evolution for you, or did you seek to really push yourself creatively? Was there any transitory material between releases?
It wasn’t so much a conceited effort to push myself creatively as it was a strong feeling that I ought to create something very different, and the new direction resulted directly from that. I’ve been largely disinterested in metal probably since “A Waning Light” was released, and in writing “Otherlike Darknesses” I’d sought to fill what I perceived to be a gap and create something which I felt to be lacking in metal, and what I would want to listen to myself. And naturally this ended up being a bit more out-there than things I’d done before.
There was no intermediate material; I started writing “Winds Batter My Keep” immediately after “A Waning Light” came out!
Since they’re quite hard for me to nail down myself, what were your primary influences on Otherlike Darknesses? Compositionally, guitar and bass playing, all of the above!
The metal influences are still the same as A Waning Light, actually! Beverast, Disembowelment, Timeghoul, Demilich, Gorguts. As well as the ever-lingering black metal influence that I’ll likely never shake.
The bulk of the influence on the album however, especially structurally, is from 70s symphonic prog (Yes, Genesis) and 20th century classical music, especially the Russian stuff (Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Scriabin). This is basically all I was listening to from 2020 until I finished writing OD. I did a little experiment where I took the sheet music for a Shostakovich symphony and transposed it for metal instrumentation in Guitar Pro; I didn’t finish the whole thing, but this gives you an idea of where I was trying to take my metal writing.
As far as guitar playing goes, I really do not consider myself to be much of a guitarist and basically never practice, only noodle around to write and then record. I can’t point to any individual band or musician and say “they’re an influence”, so it’d just broadly be the metal bands I’ve liked in the past which serve as guitar inspiration.
Bass influence is a lot easier to describe — when I was just getting into metal at 13 or 14 I was hugely into Metallica, already quite interested in bass (underdog instruments are way cooler) and so Cliff Burton becomes the typical first bass idol, even before I owned a bass. I think I got my first bass at age 15, and guitar shortly after (still the only guitar I’ve ever owned). Then came Steve Digiorgio with Sadus and Death, with his three-finger hertas and flicking power chords, which I still do a lot of to this day.
Then when I got into prog rock I of course became obsessed with Geddy Lee and Chris Squire, who probably form the bulk of my bass writing inspiration as far as note choice goes. Geddy Lee is easily my favourite bass player.
Part of what I like most about Otherlike Darknesses is the balance between accessibility and complexity. It’s not incomprehensible; there’s clear throughlines in each track, yet they are still long, heavily-layered, linear songs. Is this a conscious factor in your composing?
It’s absolutely conscious, yes. I tried to make something that reveals its secrets more and more over a long period of many listens. The tracks “talk to themselves” a lot over their very long runtime, often in ways quite hidden, and everything is placed on purpose. I wrote all of it in large sections, which I then had to figure out how to piece together, then added a lot of other touches to make them cohesive wholes. Not a single note on the album is random!
Another aspect of Otherlike Darknesses I really enjoy is the bass performance (you even uploaded a playthrough of “Pale Flowers Under an Empty Sky”). How do you approach incorporating bass into the rest of the music when it’s not uncommon for the instrument to be neglected in extreme metal?
I mentioned up there that I had always been drawn to bass due to a sort of underdog factor, and that’s never gone away. As I was primarily trying to make music that interested myself first and foremost, obviously the elements I like in music were going to come to the fore, and that included complex bass parts that I spent a long time writing. Mostly when writing bass I try to create a bridge between guitar/keys (harmony) and drums (rhythm), which is a very normal if not the default way to approach bass writing, but I like to stretch that as far as it can go without being “too much”.
I think it’s underutilised in extreme metal as the harmonic content of the guitars, both in a musical and audiological sense, really take up the whole bandwidth so there isn’t a lot of room for bass lines to deviate, and if they do it’s often hard to mix it such that it’s both audible and not a hindrance to the rest of the mix. On that topic, Brendan who mastered the album did think that my mixing of the bass was too present in the mids/upper mids for his liking and interfered with the rest of the mix, but I went ahead with it anyway and I think it worked out quite well 🙂
And there’s also of course just the plain fact that a lot of styles of extreme metal benefit more from simpler bass lines than from complicated ones.
How did Robin Stone’s session drums come about? Did he provide any input, or is the final product what you envisioned in the first place?
He’s a very popular session drummer online and he was my first option after I’d unsuccessfully tried to find someone here in Norway. I had very thoroughly programmed drums for the whole album, basically just to write the music with, and I told him to almost entirely ignore them, and go nuts. I do remember specifically telling him to ignore bar lines and play “over the bar” a lot. The album is absolutely covered in frequent time signature/tempo changes, and he seemed the one for the challenge.
It was my first real experience with someone doing something else over my music other than what I’d envisioned, and I tried to just let him play whatever he felt like. Alas, there were a few parts I had him redo, or which I built entirely anew from samples of his kit, which he’s not used to as people are understandably generally very impressed with the first thing he sends back!
All in all it was a huge improvement over (and completely different to) what I had originally programmed, which was more in line with my own drumming on the first Felgrave album. Very happy with how the drums turned out.
The lyrics of Otherlike Darknesses are appropriately as dark and melancholic as the music. Were there any particular influences and inspirations behind them?
Lyrics always come last in my writing process. Music is a very visual experience for me and often the music is already speaking for itself and conjuring its own imagery unbidden, from which I first draw the song title, and then try to write lyrics based on what I see when I listen.
I can’t lie, the lyrical process is easily the most difficult part of writing for me as, like I said, the music already speaks for itself, and it’s hard to put that into human words 🙂 Gotta have something to vocalise, though!
I was also reading the Malazan series of novels while writing the music and lyrics, and much of the imagery in those books snuck its way in. One line in one book was “pale flowers beneath an empty sky”, which eventually popped into my head paraphrased as a song title while writing the intro.
What are some of your favorite releases of 2025? Metal or non-metal.
In all honesty I’ve been listening to very little music recently, aside from old and worn classics, and I am completely and utterly out of the loop when it comes to anything released in the last decade. This is pretty normal for me after I finish writing an album, though the periods of disinterest grow longer as I get older. I don’t think I could name 5 albums released in 2025 in any style – not for lack of trying mind you, as I don’t want to be that guy who thinks nothing can ever beat the old stuff, but I just can’t seem to be interested, especially not in modern metal.
Lastly, what does the future look like for Felgrave or any other musical projects you might be working on?
I’m moving back to Australia in February next year, and hopefully the musical process will begin again shortly as I’d really like to continue in the same trajectory as between “A Waning Light” and “Otherlike Darknesses”. Something really out-there, but still deeply coherent and thoroughly composed. Perhaps not as far from OD as OD is from AWL, though!
Only time will tell as I’ve never been able to purposefully sit down and write, I just have to wait for it to start happening, after which it usually comes in a flood. The very vague idea I have in my head is 4 very long tracks, perhaps even with some short dungeon synth interludes, or failing that, a dungeon synth companion EP (a style I’ve written albums in before but under anonymous project names 😉 ).
I’d also really like to totally re-record the 2016 Dead Hills album “Gateways”, if for no other reason than to please myself. That album meant a great deal to me back then, and still does, but it was poorly performed, poorly recorded, terribly mixed, and not mastered at all. The end result is pretty grim but I think there’s a really, really good album hiding underneath those badly played drums and acoustic guitar, and often horribly out of tune clean vocals, and that it deserves to be recorded properly. Who knows if I’ll still be able to do the black metal screeching in my 30s, though…
Thanks heaps again for this interview, it was a pleasure!
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Eternal hails to M.L. for his time!
For more on Otherlike Darknesses, check out our full album review.
— Colin
Otherlike Darknesses is available now through Transcending Obscurity Records. For more information on Felgrave, check out their Facebook page.