In about three years Detroit's VAZUM have come up with an impressive five-album body of work of which the latest two arrived in very quick succession. The band's last canonical album, Vampyre Villa, came out in August 2020 and exhibited their new approach with the addition of vocalist and bassist, Emily Sturm, to the project's foundational darkness envisioned and led by multi-instrumentalist, Zach Pliska.
In that same newly-established direction also comes Rated V, a Halloween concept album, with its titles and themes lifting from classic horror's frontlines, and a sound which mixes doom metal, gothic rock, shoegaze and deathrock into something darkly fanciful, storytelling and musically bold.
The seven-minute gothgaze terror of Vampyre comes alongside an appropriately unearthly, DIY, horror-themed visual.