Metal

Lepidoptera Records · 25 September 2026

“Mantree I” runs eleven minutes and twenty-three seconds and is Bigmoth’s calling card: guitar and bass in constant motion, metre changes that arrive without warning, and a voice, Zemfira Baghirova’s, that moves from singing to a growl without making any ceremony of it. It deflates on purpose at the end, in an atmospheric stretch that runs into “Mantree II: Coma” (4:39), its short partner, where the process is reversed: it begins clean, gathers tension for almost the whole piece and detonates in the final stretch. Together the two make up sixteen of the record’s thirty-five minutes.

The drumming that holds all this together is not the band’s own. Jynn de Jongh is credited as Bigmoth’s drummer and appears in the live videos, but all five tracks were played by Mike Malyan, of Monuments, and it shows in how much the record depends on him: the drums are what sustain the four or five directions the songs pull in, and what decide whether a metric change reads as an idea or as a seam. A debut that has to sell itself on a quartet’s rapport is built, in its most decisive part, by a guest.

The rest of the programme does not repeat the opening’s scheme. The title track (5:49) builds its first half on a funky, melodic groove before breaking, “You’re In Everything” (6:34) is where the band stays longest in a minor key, and “Meggah Konstrukt” (7:00) attacks from the first second and ends in a minute of calm. Five tracks and thirty-five minutes twenty-five seconds. The band’s own promotional copy sums it up as “it’s heavy, it’s groovy, it’s progressive…it’s a lot of things”, and what is left unresolved is who plays it: de Jongh has not recorded any of these five tracks.

Rating: 7.8/10

Text by Roger Estivill