Avant-Garde Black Metal band Henget will be releasing their first album, Beyond North Star, via Season of Mist on May 18th, 2023. Guitarist Jesse J. Heikkinen (The Abbey, Iterum Nata) and vocalist King Aleijster de Satan (King Satan, Saturnian Mist) have teamed up this Progressive Black Metal project. The Finnish band has shared a guitar play-through for the recent single, “I Am Them.”
Henget guitarist Jesse J. Heikkinen comments:
Sauna, the holiest man-made temple. The place where Finns used to enter and exit life. Nowadays, it can also mark a place where instructional videos, such as this, are made. Prepare your kantele, let the spirit of Löyly embrace you and be ready to shred like a 21st century Väinämöinen!
Drawing inspiration from the world of the occult and the ways of ancient Shamanism, Beyond North Star depicts “a violent hallucinatory journey to the depths of the mind and beyond” with a psychedelic outlook.
The album artwork for Beyond North Star was created by M.T. Salminen.
Most of the music and the lyrics for this album were purposefully improvised on the spot.
King Aleijster de Satan shares:
When I got in the studio to do the vocals, I only had various notes, sometimes hastily written on a small piece of paper and more or less some kind of loose structures to go with it. Most of them I gathered in between 2016 and 2019 after, let’s say experimenting quite a bit. I admit natural psychedelics and other shamanic methods influenced me a lot to reach another level of consciousness, besides my long interest towards the occult and mysticism.
Those weren’t meant to get lost into but instead to be used as mere tools to help me opening new doors in my brain, a bit like a shaman would do when engaged in a ritual to reach a trance like of state. That’s also why I booked a two weeks session just for the vocals: I needed that amount of space to really dive in my subconscious. Overall, that was one of most intense recording experience I ever had but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone because the toll you have to pay once it’s done is pretty heavy.
