Victory Over the Sun – Dance You Monster to My Soft Song! [Things You Might Have Missed 2023]

Victory Over the Sun is a project of the Portland-based multi-instrumentalist Vivian Tylińska who, along with Jute Gyte’s Adam Kalmbach and Kostnatění’s D.L., represents the diversity and power of the unorthodox take of microtonal black metal. You’ll find Tylińska is more inspired by Liturgy than Darkthrone, touches upon Kayo Dot more than Mayhem, actualizing a more triumphant and avant-garde take on black metal – although her more blackened passages are nothing short of vicious. As loose and freeform as jazz and as organic and fluid as classical, fourth full-length Dance You Monster to My Soft Song! balances the razor’s edge between traditional and otherworldly, exploring the niches and crevices in each crooked composition.

Victory Over the Sun is not inspired by the status quo, as Tylińska’s aim is not to warp listeners back to the glory days of black metal – she’s just a “girl who makes noise.” Microtonal black metal has found itself more and more a vessel for the queer and members of LGBTQIA+ to express self-discovery and identity. Victory Over the Sun is no different, the work of a trans woman offering a further intellectual layer with each theme steeped in the futurist art and music of the early 20th century. Utilizing a blend of dense and shimmering, movements are founded upon a motif that reoccurs throughout each track, revisited intensity and hypnotic repetition. Opener “Thorn Woos the Wound” is the best example, a nearly seventeen-minute foray into shimmering atmospherics and triumphant chord progressions alongside blastbeats and plods, as well as Tylińska’s blackened screech. “Madeline Becoming Judy” and “The Gold of Having Nothing” offer a similar aura, simple plucking and drumbeats collapsing into blastbeats and raw tremolo, to return to its off-kilter rhythms and a patiently sprawling wall of uncanny valley melody, motifs taking on a burning, searing quality.

Dance You Monster To My Soft Song! by Victory Over the Sun

You will certainly find your share of brutality, particularly in the shortest track “WHEEL” and closer “Black Heralds.” The former is an absolute mammoth of a track, a work of contrast due to the most optimistic lyrics of the album colliding with the most sinister riff, a crawling beast with more similarity to Portal than to Mayhem – hypnotic and funereal, otherworldly and vicious. Meanwhile, “Black Heralds” features a weighty riff to complement the darker plucking that saturates it, a smooth crescendo from ominous dripping plucking and hollow synths to a massive riff that feels like something out of Sunn O)))’s Black One. The album progression in this way maneuvers between the more exploratory songwriting and its darker conclusions, reflecting the pessimism of its lyrics (a poem by Cesar Vallejo).

Dance You Monster to My Soft Song! is an album that requires much to unpack. Every movement is intentional, with repetition used to searing proportions and melody thoughtful and patient rather than attaining to some “trve kvlt” standard. Victory Over the Sun not only stands as a landmark for LGBTQIA+ representation in a masculine-dominated style of music, but sets the bar for the burgeoning style of microtonal black metal. It’s exploratory in the best ways while ensuring that the experience of this strange type of music is not lost in the lushness – shimmering but punishing. Balancing more triumphant passages with an underworldly darkness, both undergirded by reckless and fearless songwriting, Dance You Monster to My Soft Song! is one of the best albums of the year, comfortably settling Tylińska and Victory Over the Sun – more than just the product of a “girl who makes noise” – into the upper echelon of experimental black metal.

Tracks to Check Out: ”Thorn Woos the Wound,” “WHEEL,” and “Black Heralds”

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