Imperial Triumphant: Listening into the Abyss

A journey through a world of sound is a journey through one's own mind. In the never-ending search for new sonic worlds, stepping into realms you never suspected existed is a rare delight. In my journey to the edge of imagination, I recently took another step beyond the, for me, known universe of sound, and before me rose the sonic imagery of a band; extreme experimental jazz death black metal - the adjectives to define a music fell hopelessy short. New York-based IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT cannot be easily mapped; their music is as impenetrable as it is addictive.

Imperial Triumphant, dress code 'Eyes Wide Shut'

​I. The City as Source
 
Why must darkness always wear the robes of northern forests? Why must black metal echo the tundra and not the tunnel? In New York metal trio Imperial Triumphant, black metal emerges not from a windswept fjord, but from the roaring depths of Manhattan. Their city is their mythology. Where typical black metal evokes mythic pasts and pagan landscapes, Imperial Triumphant turns its gaze forward and downward - into the throbbing veins of the modern metropolis. Their inspiration is architectural, industrial, even economic. Skyscrapers replace mountains, subways replace caverns, and capitalism’s cacophony becomes a new ritual music. The result is black metal as urban expressionism, where discordant jazz, avant-garde structures, and brutalist imagery reflect a reality shaped by finance, decay, and excess.

Rather than escape the modern world, they confront it. Rather than summon old spirits, they forge new mythologies out of city noise and sleepless nights. They turn the genre inside out - its tremolo riffs and blast beats are no nostalgic echo of frostbitten desolation, but weapons of critique and celebration in a world lit by neon and drowned in reverb. 

II. Music Without a Map
 
In the world of Imperial Triumphant, there are little to no signposts. No hooks to hold onto, no choruses to guide you home. You navigate it like a ruined city without a map, where each turn reveals not clarity, but further confusion. Music that demands not just a tolerance for chaos but a love for it.

At first, it sounds messy. Broken. Hostile, even. Instruments scrape and collide, rhythms stutter, melodies vanish before they form. But in that brokenness lies a strange and unsettling allure. This music doesn’t just estrange you from other music - it alienates you from yourself. Why do I love this? Perhaps because, amid the collapse, something gleams. Somewhere within the noise, something will be revealed. A brief moment of clarity. A haunting texture. A riff that breaks through like sunlight in a crumbling cathedral. Something that sets you free. There’s beauty in the dissonance, nothing new there but, more importantly, there is meaning in the dissonance. This is a discord, a constructed chaos, that reflects the world back at us, in all its fractured, feverish complexity.

​The discord has a voice, and it speaks. It speaks in the dialect of traffic noise at 3 a.m., of concrete towers and flickering billboards, of sirens and silence and the ache of modern solitude. It tells stories that beauty alone cannot. 

III. Headbanging to Architecture
 
Imperial Triumphant are not just observers of the urban sprawl; they are its sonic avatars. Their music feels like headbanging in the shadow of a skyscraper, where every downstroke vibrates through rusted steel girders and cracked concrete.

This is the sound of Manhattan devouring itself. Of opulence and entropy entangled. They fuse the angular chaos of big band jazz with the blast-beaten fury of black metal, conjuring the restless spirits of Charles Mingus, John Zorn and the operatic nightmares Scott Walker made later in his career. But everything here is corroded. Guitars clang like twisted metal in heavy traffic (founder/frontman Zachary Ezrin is obsessed by the Doppler effect, the tremolo bar on his guitar is in permanent deployment). Basslines lurch with the weight of collapsing tenements.

It feels ancient and futuristic at once. An occult ceremony conducted in a penthouse suite (Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut is a massive influence). A mass for the end of history. A procession through modern ruin, through flashing lights and choking smoke, where time dissolves and only the architecture remains.
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The music of Imperial Triumphant, in all its glistening menace and broken majesty, doesn’t seek transcendence rather than it drags you down—into subways, sewers, data centers, dead-end streets. And in that descent, you don’t escape reality. You encounter it, raw and unfiltered. In shapes and forms never imagined before. 

Spirit of Ecstasy

​IV. Total theater 
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To experience Imperial Triumphant solely through audio is one thing. Their music - already dense, disorienting, and multi-layered - reaches an even fuller expression when paired with their visual work. Their video clips are extensions of the music’s architecture in which next to city of New York, Art Deco, silent movies (Metropolis) and, for their latest album Goldstar, commercials from the 1950s are important sources of inspiration. Like a modern Gesamtkunstwerk, they weave sound, image, performance, and concept into a single, overwhelming whole.

These visuals don’t decode the music, they deepen its ambiguity. In a clip like Merkurius Gilded, featuring guest appearances by (elevator) saxophonist Kenny G and his son, death metal guitarist and vocalist, Max Gorelick, what could have been novelty becomes profound discomfort. The video is an opulent fever dream - gleaming coins, ritualistic masks, warped reflections of excess. The saxophone, traditionally a symbol of sensuality or jazz cool, is recontextualized into something alien and ceremonial. This is not so much genre fusion as it is it’s genre deconstruction, mirrored visually in the clash between sterile modernity and arcane performance. The result is a sensory overload, a bombardment of meaning that doesn’t resolve into narrative, but hovers in tension - just as the music refuses conventional structure or release.

This is closer to Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Totaltheater than to the music video format as we know it. Zimmermann imagined a stage where time collapses, where simultaneous epochs and realities unfold at once, where montage replaces linearity. Imperial Triumphant seems to operate from the same impulse. Their clips craft worlds. Total works for a total collapse. And in that collapse, they find strange, blinding revelation.

From the clip "Merkurius Gilded"

​IV. Finding the Familiar in the Chaotic
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I like music with intensity and substance. Music that leaves me, somewhere in alleged chaos, with a hint of wisdom, a glimmer of knowledge. Something that makes me understand, just by feeling. Music that also, once in a while, grants you a glimpse - something fleeting, melodic, something almost familiar. It’s not comfort, exactly. It’s recognition. Like catching a scent from childhood while standing on a grimy subway platform. Like hearing your name whispered in a crowded room. Like spotting a memory in the corner of your eye just as it vanishes. It happens in the music of Imperial Triumphant and it happens, for instance, in the music of Pierre Boulez whose Répons I recently had the pleasure of hearing it live for the first time - experiencing live that is.
 
In a sprawling, modernist labyrinth of electronics and acoustic fragments, of precision and unpredictability I was remembered of musicals, film scores and crowded city centres. Répons doesn’t guide you. It offers no path, no clear structure. You make your own map. You move by intuition, tracing your way through pulses and silences, through spatial disorientation and shifting orchestral terrain. And when you find something - anything - you weren’t sure you were even looking for, it feels deeply personal. Not because the piece was made for you, but because you had to uncover it. No one handed it to you. You earned it.

Goldstar, the latest album of Imperial Triumphant

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​V. Revelation

​That’s the strange intimacy of music like this. It resists, obscures, even repels - and yet, when it opens, when it allows something to break through, the connection is sharper than any pop chorus could ever be. It becomes yours. It’s a reminder that meaning isn’t always given. Sometimes, it’s built - fragile, fleeting, in the act of listening itself.

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- Wouter de Moor