Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja (Orange Vinyl)

Oranssi Pazuzu’s Muuntautuja (2024) is a hallucinatory plunge into the band’s most unsettling and experimental territory yet.

The Finnish quintet, long celebrated for their fusion of black metal with psychedelic and avant-garde textures, use Muuntautuja—which translates to “Shapeshifter”—as both a title and a manifesto. Across its six-year gestation, the album mutates constantly, slipping between forms with a serpentine logic that feels both alien and inevitable. Electronics squelch and warp, beats pulse with a trip-hop unease, and guitars dissolve into noise or reappear as spectral riffs. The result is a soundscape that is at once suffocating and expansive, a paradox that defines Oranssi Pazuzu’s appeal.

What makes Muuntautuja remarkable is its refusal to settle into any single identity. The band began as an adventurous black metal act, but here they stretch far beyond genre boundaries, weaving cosmic horror atmospheres with industrial grit and hypnotic repetition. Vocals emerge like incantations from another dimension, sometimes buried in the mix, sometimes clawing their way to the surface. The album feels less like a collection of songs than a continuous encounter with something unstable, a shapeshifting entity that resists comprehension.

Critics have described the record as anxiety-inducing, suffocating, and mesmerizing, and those contradictions are precisely its strength. It is music that destabilizes, that thrives on disorientation, yet rewards listeners with moments of transcendence when its chaos coalesces into strange beauty. The Quietus noted its “post-trip-hop beats and black metal roar,” while Nuclear Blast called it a “boa constrictor of slithering, warping, interdimensional cosmic horror”.