Rapper Ghostemane has never been shy about his deep appreciation for metal’s aesthetic and occult imagery. He’s taken things one step further, having just released a bonafide black metal EP, Baader-Meinhof, under the moniker Blackmage.
The name of the project was taken from the title of Ghostemane’s fifth album, which came out in 2016. Here, the 29-year-old indulges in the extreme metal that caught his ears in teenage years, sticking to an obscenely lo-fi style that was popularized by second wave black metal acts, falling somewhere between the hopelessly bleak Xasthur and the tin-can production of Gorgoroth‘s Under the Sign of Hell.
Much like Ghostemane’s music, these three Blackmage tracks have a fractured structure and it’s not uncommon to hear the hornet’s nest of distortion drop out entirely as some clean-picked interlude passages offer a hint of reprieve.
For now, the EP is only available on SoundCloud and can be heard below.
If you go looking for Blackmage on Spotify, it’ll only lead to profound confusion — there’s a Finnish hip-hop/trap-metal artist by that name whose style is certainly influenced by Ghostemane.
Blackmage, Baader Meinhof EP
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