Danakil Heat – Doomsday Delight

 

 

Danakil Heat – Doomsday Delight
Self-released – 2025
Rock, Stoner, Metal, Doom, Groove, Grunge
Rated: ***

My lovely wife returned from a week long hike near Saariselkä only a few weeks ago. A week of nothing but beautiful Finnish nature. No cellphone reception and no civilization. No music either. Except for the sounds of nature, the kuukkeli and the wind howling through the trees… And in the shadowy forests of sound, where thunder rolls beneath the ancient roots and the sky shows a maelstrom of cosmic storms, Danakil Heat returns, only months after releasing Life On The Green Planet, with a new EP called Doomsday Delight. An EP that feels forged in the heat of the Kalevala’s most chaotic verses. 

Yes, we love Finland, and hope to display our little knowledge by weaving some of it through a review. We are silly like that. But Danakil Heat is anything but silly. Much like demigod and hero Väinämöinen, the mythic sage who summoned worlds with his song, Danakil Heat conjure a world from distortion, doom and groove.

It's a storm lasting sixteen minutes, not long in mortal time, but long enough to feel like a shaman’s trance beneath the northern lights. The band blends doom, grunge, and stoner with the raw urgency of a forest fire sweeping through dry pine. The production is stripped back, rough like bark, and carries the unmistakable howl of nineties alternative.

Opening with the title track, Doomsday Delight sounds like the birth-cry of a sky god, with vocals that pierce like the wind on a frozen lake and riffs that shake the roots of the world-tree. There’s a mischievous energy here too, the kind you’d expect from the trickster god Lemminkäinen before he wandered off into danger. And that danger is everywhere… 

One More Life and Searching the Stars carry the EP further into the tundra, sonically vast and windswept, where scorched earth meets the cold stare of distant constellations. The ghost of the nineties grunge scene lingers here like a lost forest spirit, One More Life, in particular, channels the mournful strength of the legends of yore. 

There’s a sense of prophecy embedded in the lyrics, end-times visions told not with fear, but with reverence, like a rune-singer warning of a long winter to come. Winter is indeed coming. Danakil Heat doesn’t chase originality for its own sake. Instead, they dig deep into their roots, like black spruce twisted by centuries of wind, and from there they draw something primal. Danakil Heat is a stomp around the fire. A call to the ancient ones. In the great northern tradition of storytellers and sound-shapers, Danakil Heat stands ready. And if the world does burn… Well, at least we’ll have a killer soundtrack.

(Written by JK)

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