Tómarúm – Beyond Obsidian Euphoria: Dreamscapes in Ash, Solos in Flame, and the Endless Pursuit of Meaning
TÓMARÚM
Beyond Obsidian Euphoria
(Prosthetic Records, April 4, 2025)
It begins with a lullaby and ends with a scream from the deepest shaft of the self. Beyond Obsidian Euphoria is Tómarúm’s grand plunge into the psychic furnace—a record that doesn’t chronicle survival so much as interrogate the cost of it. And in doing so, the Atlanta quintet has conjured one of the most emotionally merciless and musically expansive albums of the year.
This isn’t some blackened post-whatever flirtation with despair. This is full commitment. This is art born in the crater of something personal and unrelenting. And while its predecessor Ash in Realms of Stone Icons hinted at a band unafraid of nuance and excess, Beyond Obsidian Euphoria is the sound of that band forging their identity in flame—no longer reporting from the edge, but flinging themselves into the chasm headfirst.
The journey opens with In Search of the Triumph Beyond… (Obsidian Overture), a track that plays out like a miniature album unto itself. It begins in a trance state—ambient tones hanging like incense in a trauma ward—before detonating into a convulsion of black metal shrieks and fretboard incantations. But Tómarúm doesn’t stay locked in that feral place. The song twists and expands, pulling in acoustic passages, contemplative bass lines, and lead guitars that arc like searchlights over wreckage. It’s ten minutes long, but feels like a vision quest crammed into a single breath.
This sense of multi-movement storytelling recurs throughout the record, especially on pieces like Shed This Erroneous Skin and Halcyon Memory: Dreamscapes Across the Blue, where brutality and beauty don’t just coexist—they sharpen each other. The guitars aren’t simply vehicles for distortion; they speak. They whisper, weep, and roar. And the arrangements—dense without being bloated—channel progressive ambition without sacrificing visceral impact. There are moments that flirt with the astral intricacy of early BTBAM, others that descend into the kind of abyssal shriek-and-riff onslaught usually reserved for the bleakest corners of the Icelandic black metal scene. And yet it never feels stitched together. This is a single language, fractured but fluent.
The record doesn’t just lean on the epic, though. Blood Mirage is a snarling shard of death-prog aggression, all serrated riffs and hellish growls. It’s transitional, sure, but transitional like a bridge set on fire behind you. It doesn’t just move the narrative forward—it scars it.
Introspection III, on the other hand, arrives like a vision through smoked glass. Gone are the blast beats and barbed wire screams. In their place: folk textures, spectral leads, and a weightless melancholy that feels plucked from a dream you don’t fully remember. It’s a gentle rupture, strategically placed to remind you that even in this sonic warzone, vulnerability is not weakness—it’s the goddamn point.
But nothing prepares you for Silver, Ashen Tears. Clocking in over ten minutes, it’s the record’s emotional supernova—a transcendent journey that fuses luminous acoustics with volcanic heaviness. It doesn’t just build; it ascends, breaking through cloud after cloud of pain, until the only thing left is light. And yet that light isn’t warm. It’s searing. You don’t leave this song healed. You leave it altered.
And then there’s The Final Pursuit of Light. Fourteen minutes of acoustic dread, radiant sorrow, and sudden distortion. A saga that feels less like a conclusion and more like an open-ended reckoning. The vocals don’t function as narrative devices—they're emotional detonators, landing like journal entries read under duress. It’s the sound of a soul taking inventory before it disintegrates. Or ascends. Or maybe both.
What makes Beyond Obsidian Euphoria so compelling isn’t just its technical execution—though make no mistake, the musicianship here is surgical and staggering. It’s the emotional clarity. The willingness to be about something in a genre that too often mistakes obfuscation for mystique. There’s no sloganeering. No easy catharsis. Just a group of artists dragging their inner world into the light, and setting it to music that flays, redeems, and refuses to compromise.
This record could have collapsed under its own ambition. It could have wandered into indulgence or drowned in its own density. But Tómarúm never lose the thread. Their control is ruthless. Their intention, undeniable.
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “The darker the night, the brighter the stars.” Beyond Obsidian Euphoria is the sound of five musicians forging their own constellations, not to escape the darkness—but to map it.
🔥 Score: 9/10
💀 Essential Tracks: Silver, Ashen Tears, In Search of the Triumph Beyond…, Shed This Erroneous Skin, The Final Pursuit of Light
📻 File Under: Progressive trauma-core, Psychedelic obliteration, Post-depression black metal ascension