"Cult Classics Vol. 1" Sear the Soul of Nyxy Nyx

Nyxy Nyx is a band that conjures up the feelings of pain all too well. Even though the band doesn’t have a large following, this element is what has fused people to their music. The Philadelphia band has been around in some capacity since 2014, spending some years in the murky waters and gothic scenes around the city of New Orleans in the middle of that time. Their discography consists of dozens of albums, primarily consisting of short, dark, and grinding songs, mostly recorded entirely by Brandon Reichert in his own bedroom studio set up. Their new release, Cult Classics Vol. 1 is the first Nyxy Nyx album to be recorded in a full on studio, together with Reichert’s band.

The album feels incredibly different from previous ones. Songs seem to sprawl on longer and explore more textures away from the ghastly fuzzy bass churns that have defined a large number of the band’s songs. There are more radiating sharp guitar rings, and shimmering small melodies. These elements of brightness texture the dark leering moments that still loom over Nyxy Nyx’s music. The second song “they called u -Wild-” forms like this. It has an almost western feel to it, slowly sliding like drawn out pans over a faded horizon. A light airy voice floats over Reichert’s weary vocals, describing someone who, “Left as quickly as they came,” like they faded like a ghost across the dreary plains.

Nyxy Nyx's Cult Classics Vol. 1 of are songs about the ephemeral relation to other people. No matter how close you get to someone, no matter how overlapped the points of where one begins and the other one ends become, there will be a time when distance cuts through. The tendrils of flesh sear as they are pulled apart. In that distance there is a space leftover, a ringing where it feels like something should be. For Nyxy Nyx in the emptiness there is a callused but tender somberness. 

That energy lingers, and is conjured up in the songs of Cult Classics Vol. 1. It feels like a step into the nighttime air, amidst the cooling dread of autumn. The skeletal limbs of trees are slight in the backdrop. It’s the moment where the atmosphere starts to feel like liquid. That feeling is most exemplified on “hold me (I’m shaking)” where it begins with a lightly picked melody and the eerie screech of what sounds like a train breaking in the far off distance. The dam in the sky then breaches, gushing the macabre air outward. Instead of being picked up by the current though, it’s more like standing on the surface floor, with the following continuous flow washing over the stationary body. It’s reflected in the lyric, “Hold me and stay, and the night spreads over me again.”

There are plenty of moments that are quick, dark, and grimy giving into Nyxy Nyx’s sound of dusky, bone grating gothic rock. It shows on the first track “empty gesture”, and on “ashtray” where it fades out to silence halfway through, before fading back in and continuing on. What’s most prominent on Cult Classics Vol. 1 though, are those more languishing, sprawling moments. You could point out at these parts and say how they’re too drawn out, lulling into nothing. Trotting along the path of slowcore that has already been flattened out over the past couple years. However, they feel more intricate than that. 

In these moments that stretch on into eras like on the last two songs “in haze” and “endless hex”, they best encapsulate a compulsory dread. They’re slow and drifting, like a perpetual sway back and forth, marinating in the boundless feeling. Listening, it’s like the songs slowly dissolve, until there’s nothing but stillness. The experience is like all of your skin falling off in stasis, exposing the rippling muscle, connecting to the pain from Nyxy Nyx even closer than touch, until you are more acquainted with and understanding of your own.