Release Date July 10th, 2026
Format Digital
Genre Blackened Doom Metal
Origin United States
Blackstaff began in 2022 in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains as the solo project of Dustin Cleary, a multi-instrumentalist whose interests in horror, dark fantasy, Germanic heathenry and role-playing games shape the band’s subject matter. Every release is built around imagined realms, folklore and grim acts of transformation. Cleary handles the music as an extension of that world-building, joining Sabbath-rooted doom riffs with death metal growls, black metal shrieks, blast beats, keyboards, noise synths and sampled sounds.
His approach places riff construction ahead of nonstop oppression, allowing the music to shift between lumbering doom and faster extreme-metal attacks. Blackstaff has developed through increasingly ambitious arrangements and a wider range of electronic textures, though the project remains centred on storytelling through severe, riff-heavy music. The result is a band with a personal creative direction and enough stylistic breadth to move beyond a basic blackened-doom formula.
“Drowner” contains three songs, presenting a connected tale inspired by will-o’-the-wisps, haunted wetlands and the creatures awaiting travellers led away from safe ground. The lyrics follow victims drawn into a swamp, where they are consumed, raised as undead or harvested for body parts by an unseen master; the final destination is a flesh golem assembled from those remains. Blackstaff uses crawling doom chords, death-metal eruptions, high screams, low growls
and uneasy electronics to give this story a suitably diseased atmosphere. The long opening composition has imposing riffs and effective escalation, though several ideas remain in circulation beyond their ideal span. The shorter material brings firmer pacing, with “Flesh Golem” closing the EP through grotesque imagery and blunt rhythmic movement.
Recorded at Dark Stick Studio, mixed by Todd Purnick at Beware Of Jesus, and mastered by Nettleingham Audio with Purnick, the production is saturated and imposing, allowing the low end and layered guitars to dominate without reducing the vocals to background noise. Some electronic transitions appear attached to the songs more than embedded within them, and the central riff language occasionally stays in a narrow lane. “Drowner” is a grim, cohesive EP with a compelling concept, strong vocal range and enough variation to justify its extended compositions, even when the arrangement could use tighter editing.
|7.3
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