Mass VI

The Artist

Amenra is a Belgian band formed in the late 1990s in Kortrijk, built around vocalist Colin H. van Eeckhout and guitarist Mathieu Vandekerckhove. They are the flagship of the Church of Ra collective, a loose family of Belgian artists working across music, tattooing, and visual art with a shared aesthetic of ritual, suffering, and catharsis. Their sound fuses the crushing weight of post-metal and sludge with hushed folk passages and screamed-and-whispered vocals, often sung in Flemish, French, and English. Amenra's records are numbered as Mass installments, each one a chapter in an ongoing meditation on grief and endurance. Mass VI arrived in 2017 and marked their debut for Neurot Recordings, a natural home given the band's kinship with Neurosis.

The Album

Mass VI was recorded in Kortrijk and produced by longtime collaborator Billy Bottle alongside the band, keeping the process close to the Church of Ra inner circle. The six-track record leans into extreme dynamic range, moving between near-silence and enormous walls of amplified sound with little middle ground. Released on Neurot Recordings in October 2017, it broadened Amenra's international reach while staying rooted in their ritualistic identity. Thematically the album continues their long meditation on loss, faith, and the endurance required to keep living through pain. It is heavy in every sense: sonically, emotionally, and in the deliberate patience of its pacing.

Listen For

The whisper-to-scream dynamic. Colin H. van Eeckhout routinely shifts from fragile clean singing into throat-shredding screams. Listen to how "Children of the Eye" uses that contrast to structure its emotional peaks.

Guitar texture over riffs. Amenra build with tone and repetition rather than traditional riffing. Notice how the guitars in "A Solitary Reign" ring, decay, and layer into something closer to a slow tide than a groove.

Space and restraint. "Edelkroone" is an almost entirely quiet piece, and its placement early in the record resets your ears before the weight returns. Pay attention to how the band uses silence as a compositional tool.

Language as texture. "Plus Près De Toi (Closer to You)" delivers its anguish in French, and the sound of the words carries as much weight as their meaning. Let the phonetics land before you reach for a translation.

The closing catharsis. "Diaken" ends the record with a sustained release that feels earned by everything before it. Track how the final minutes resolve, or refuse to resolve, the tension the album has built.