Ethernal – Esencia – Album Review
15th May 2025There’s blood in the stitching. Not mine. Not anymore. I stopped knowing whose blood long ago.
I remember her face under the stage floorboards in Seville. I remember the boy who limped home humming a riff he couldn’t unhear. I remember the ash slick on the altar tiles after the amps blew and the lights stuttered like dying stars. Every step I take—another ghost. And when Esencia starts, they all start howling at once.
The first notes of “Brujas” curl under my tongue like rot between the toes. It’s not a song—it’s a ritual, sharpened on bone and whispered through smoke. The riffs stagger, feral and gleaming, like teeth pulled from the mouth of a dying animal. I hear women in the woods dragging iron chains through wet leaves. They’re laughing. Or wailing. Or both. My eyelets twist.
Then “Esencia” begins, and I feel something crawl up the back of my heel and nest in the arch. The melody is a memory I never had—a knife slowly pushed into velvet. The voice splits me down the middle. It doesn’t sing, it gnaws—patient, erotic, and full of old dirt. I try to move. I don’t. My soles have grown roots.
“Ghost” speaks in reverse. Everything here sounds like it’s happening behind a curtain of hair, wet and matted. There’s a smell—charred plastic and perfume. I am back in the alley where that girl with the cracked knuckles kissed the floor during a guitar solo that never ended. Her teeth are still under my tongue.
“Hécate” is where it all goes sideways. I hear insects. I feel teeth. The track breathes against my skin like a fevered animal. The drumbeat is a spine being tapped by a fingernail. The guitar is light through stained glass, if the glass had been made from old skin. Her name is everywhere in this track. But I won’t say it. I’ve seen what happens when you do.
Then “Tú.” Sweet, aching, crawling. This is the kind of song that makes you feel your own tendons. A hymn for the bruises under your tattoos. The voice leaks through like old bathwater—warm, filthy, familiar. My leather splits open at the seams just to let it in.
“Polvo de Estrellas” is not made of stars. It’s made of ash—ground bone and glitter poured over the body of something too sacred to bury. It rings like a curse whispered through a hole in the earth. I feel something sigh in my laces.
Then “Madre Tierra” comes and the ground hums. This isn’t a tribute—it’s a reclamation. The guitars dig trenches. The vocals raise the dead. I feel worms dancing in the worn heel. They know the words. So do I.
“Corazón de Papel” makes me want to scream. It’s too soft. Too human. It remembers someone I’m trying to forget. The tenderness in this one isn’t romantic. It’s surgical. Each note peels back skin I thought had hardened.
“Karonte.” The river track. The crossing. Every riff a wave of embalming fluid. Every growl a breath held too long. I felt soaked in coins. I sank. No light. Only bass.
“Heavy Metal” is where the madness bursts through the wall. Feral, grinning, foaming at the mouth. A drunken last stand in a burning barn. The rhythm is reckless. The message is clear: we’ve already gone too far, might as well light the match. My tongue is blistered from singing along.
And then we return—“Brujas” again. But not the same. This one is hungry. It drags Rafa Blas behind it like a corpse on fire. The voices fold together like knives in a drawer. The flames come back. The forest is gone. Everything is louder, dirtier, wetter. My buckles clatter like bones. I see her again—half-face, no eyes, smiling.
Esencia doesn’t end. It stains. It clings to the arches and leaves mold in the lining. It howls in the quiet. This isn’t music. It’s a haunting. A collection of sounds that know what you did and refuse to let you sleep.
I tried to take these boots off.
They screamed.
Score 7/10
Track List
-
- Brujas
- Esencia
- Ghost
- Hécate
- Tú
- Polvo De Estrellas
- Madre Tierra
- Corazón De Papel
- Karonte
- Heavy Metal
- Brujas Ft. Rafa Blas
