Iskandr |Sacraal |Eisenwald

Iskandr is the one man band of O. Iskandr from Nijmegen, Netherlands. The project grew out of Haeresis Noviomagi, the city's black metal collective. The early material threaded folk melody and Dutch lyrics through raw black metal. "Euprosopon" came out through Eisenwald in 2018, and "Vergezicht" in 2021 dragged the project deeper into folk, psychedelia and long, ceremonial songwriting. Each release has cut another tie with the black metal roots.

"Sacraal" runs seven tracks and a little over forty minutes. It was written and recorded across Copenhagen, Nijmegen and Arnhem in 2025, mixed between Nijmegen and Limmen with T. Cochrane, and mastered by Pieter Kloos at The Void Studio in Eindhoven. The metal is gone. What remain is organ drones, acoustic strumming, a cold industrial hum and a voice singing in Dutch like a village preacher at the end of the world. The production is warm, deep and wide open. The organ swells up from the floor, the vocals float high above it, and the quiet stretches are left quiet, with nothing piled on to fill them.

"Bevreemdend Klaroengeschal" opens on a note of medieval triumph, all hymn and banner. "Zonsonderkomst" then drifts for close to twelve minutes of starlit stillness, and anyone hunting for a riff will be lost halfway through. M. Koops takes the drum stool on "Pilaren Van De Zuivere Blik" and gives it a processional march. Later the industrial undertow turns the folk colder and more post apocalyptic. The two borrowed songs slot straight into the Dutch soul of the album.

Lennaert Nijgh and Boudewijn De Groot's "Verdronken Vlinder" is pulled out of the sixties and draped in funeral black. Jackson C. Frank's "Milk And Honey" returns as "Melk En Honing", translated into Dutch and sung with a homesick ache that sits right beside Iskandr's own songs. The lyrics circle the sacred, the night sky and loss, and a listener with no Dutch will still catch the longing in every line. Putting the long track third drops the album into its deepest stillness early, and from there it moves as one long night vigil. "Sacraal" is devout, strange and haunting, a hymnbook for anyone willing to sit in the dark with it.

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