Hungarian project Thy Catafalque has announced their 13th album, Sárga erdő, which refers to the imagery of yellow forests. There’s no single story running through the record’s twelve tracks, the project leader Tamás Kátai says, “only a feeling” of “wandering through a forest built from old time, half-remembered and already turning colour.”
The single and music video for the album track “Búcsú a piros madártól” are out now.
Thy Catafalque began in Makó, in southeastern Hungary, in 1998, when Kátai and a bandmate named János Juhász put together a Black Metal project with no intention of ever playing it live. The name refers to a “catafalque”, the platform that holds a coffin during a funeral rite. Over time it became clear that the project moved beyond genre boundaries. Eventually, the approach meant a model that could mean twenty, thirty, sometimes three-dozen collaborators on a single record.
The album Vadak, released in 2021, won the Fonogram Award, which is the Hungarian equivalent of a Grammy, for Best Hard Rock/Metal Album. That same year, Thy Catafalque moved beyond being a purely as studio project and played live.
The album Alföld, in 2023, brought Thy Catafalque a second Fonogram win. XII: A gyönyörű álmok ezután jönnek followed in 2024, Kátai’s first album made with an outside producer. Thy Catafalque spent 2025 making its debut at Hellfest, Rockstadt Extreme and Alcatraz, and playing its first-ever shows in Latin America. A second European headline tour, opening at Budapest’s Dürer Kert in March 2026, has carried that momentum into the new album cycle.
Sárga erdő, arriving via Season of Mist on November 20th, 2026, was recorded across various locations and at Miracle Sound Szeged with Gábor Vári again handling engineering, mixing and mastering. It marks another first for the project by including real drums, played rather than programmed, for the first time in Thy Catafalque’s history.
Thirty-four musicians and vocalists appear across the record, along with a twenty-voice male choir, but the Folk and classical textures that we find on XII, including sitar, kamancheh, zither, strings, are handled with a lighter touch here. In terms of story, the album is impressionist, since “A forest doesn’t explain its colours—it just keeps turning them, until you look up and you’re standing somewhere new.”
