Cœur de Ronces / Mélancolie du Dhampir (France / US)
“Promo MMXXVI” 
(Oakheart Productions / Starless Music, 2026)

Between Stars and Sorrow: A Deep Dive into Coeur Doré and Mélancolie du Dhampir

There are moments in the shadowed realms of underground metal when the veil between dreams and reality seems to thin, when music feels less like sound and more like an invocation. In the intertwining outputs of Coeur Doré and Mélancolie du Dhampir, we find such moments in abundance, works that do not simply exist but inhabit the listener, folding myth, melancholy, and astral romance into soundscapes that feel as ancient as starlight and as intimate as blood coursing through the heart.

Coeur Doré, a spectral entity emerging from the French underground collective known as the Cërcle Mortüaire, stands apart from the utilitarian grind of so much contemporary Black Metal precisely because its music refuses to be confined to a single identity or geography. Within the grooves of “Visions”, a full-length digital offering released at the close of 2024, there is a vastness that stretches like cosmic sky: tracks such as “Visions of Lyssa” and “In the Eye of Orion” conjure galaxies of shifting light and darkness, where the tremolo guitars and howling vocals feel not merely performed but summoned. This sense of cosmic scale, of Black Metal as an expression of astral vastness and inner tumult, permeates the entire album, giving it an almost hallucinatory quality, as though the songs were born from visions glimpsed at the edge of consciousness itself. Visions of Lyssa drifts with a meditative intensity, its riffs sprawling like constellations in flux, while the title “Dark Comet” streaks across the horizon with a kind of stellar ferocity, its momentum driven as much by atmospheric depth as by sheer rhythmic force. The cosmic dance continues in “Dancing with Mnemosyne on Titan”, where the music feels suspended, a paradox of weight and lift, as if spinning on the ringed shoulders of Saturn itself. The listener is drawn not simply into a series of songs, but into a sweeping mythopoetic journey that defies mere categorization, dissolving the boundary between the terrestrial and the celestial.

What makes Coeur Doré’s work so remarkable is not just its ambition, but its capacity to weave disparate emotional threads into a tapestry of sound that feels both intimate and infinite. The mixture of raw blackened edges with sweeping, almost psychedelic expanses, give the music an uncanny duality, at once cold and radiant, bleak yet suffused with cosmic wonder. In this sense, the album becomes a meditation on existence itself, a sonic symposium where elemental forces and inner landscapes collide. The bonus track “Sous l'emprise du Nimbus Doré”, with its shifting storms and atmospheric devotions, feels like the culmination of this vision, a sprawling rite at the threshold where sky and psyche merge.

In contrast, yet complementary in its own evocative way, stands the singular entity of Mélancolie du Dhampir, an American Black Metal project whose very name conjures a lineage of sorrow and nocturnal romance. With “Amor”, a limited edition full-length released in 2025, the music aligns itself not with cosmic vastness but with the haunting interiority of love and loss. This is Black Metal that breathes the elegiac and the existential, weaving themes of romance, melancholia, and vampiric longing into its fabric. The album opens with an instrumental that whispers like a confession in the dead of night, leading into compositions such as “Guilty Cross” and “Seraphim”, tracks that feel carved from the raw marrow of emotional gravity. There is a haunting tenderness to the melodies that threads through even the most turbulent passages, as if each riff is tinted by the ache of memory. “Where Shooting Stars Disappear Forever” evokes a kind of spectral yearning, a longing that persists even as the cosmos itself collapses around it, while “Stillborn Lullabye” and “Amor” immerse the listener in a bittersweet paradox: beauty forged through absence, love articulated through loss. In its darkest moments, the album feels like a nocturne written in blood and shadow, where every note vibrates with longing for what can never be retrieved.

Together, the works of Coeur Doré and Mélancolie du Dhampir present two complementary faces of the underground Black Metal mirror: one cast toward the infinite expanse, where celestial visions and cosmic ritual intersect with raw sonic force; the other turned inward, toward the fragile, haunted corridors of the heart. In their most powerful moments, these albums transcend genre, they become cartographies of feeling and imagination, spaces where Black Metal’s icy embrace yields not just transgression, but revelation.

There is something deeply compelling in this duality: the way Coeur Doré’s cosmic expansiveness sings of stars and visions beyond the veil, while Mélancolie du Dhampir’s melancholic nocturnes speak of love, loss, and the haunting beauty of absence. These are not merely records to be “heard”, they are experiences to be lived, realms to be entered and explored. In an underground landscape often defined by raw intensity or esoteric obscurity, these works insist on something more profound: the capacity of extreme music to articulate the ineffable, to give voice to both the infinite cosmos without and the shadowed depths within.

In the end, listening to these albums is less an act of consumption and more an act of surrender. Surrender to wind and starfire, to sorrow and memory. Surrender to the vast spaces between sound and silence, between myth and emotion, where Black Metal becomes not just music, but odyssey.

Starless Music Official Bandcamp

Oak Heart Productions Official Bandcamp