WHITE WARD

In White Ward's music the city is never just a backdrop; it becomes a state of mind that is hard to leave. Black metal's relentless assault and jazz passages that spill out into the night follow one another like different hours of the same life. In one you hear suppressed anger, in the other the exhaustion that follows it. The band is interesting less for the presence of the saxophone than for its ability to hold these two states inside the same world.

A sound from Odesa

In early 2012 the guitarist Yurii Kazaryan set out in Odesa with a drummer friend to play, in their own words, raw depressive black metal by the book. The first line-up, put together quickly, recorded a single unreleased demo and fell apart. The early recordings that followed were collected in 2016 on the Origins compilation. The label's biography names H. P. Lovecraft and Iain M. Banks among the influences of this period; states on the threshold of death and the uncanny regions of the mind were the main subject of those years.

In a 2017 interview with Dead Rhetoric, the members had described the surroundings that feed their music in concrete terms: factories in the port district, a forest of cargo cranes, tall buildings and quiet, narrow streets. Images of nature alone therefore cannot account for White Ward's darkness. The band's horizon is a port city built by human hands, wearing down as it goes on working.

Keeping the line-up together was a task in itself. When the bassist Andrii Pechatkin joined in 2015, he is said to have travelled twenty hours by train to get to rehearsals. The credits of the first album, Futility Report, make this dispersal plain: the recordings were made between 2014 and 2016 in Odesa, Kherson and Cherkasy, at the SPK Records and Anvil Records studios and in the members' homes; Alexey Nagornykh took on mixing and mastering. The album came out on 12 May 2017 on the French label Debemur Morti Productions. Andrew Rodin was on vocals, Kazaryan and Ihor Palamarchuk on guitars, Pechatkin on bass, Yurii Kononov on drums and Alexey Iskimzhi on saxophone; the former vocalist Alexey Sidorenko had written the lyrics. It was the only album Rodin, Palamarchuk, Kononov and Iskimzhi recorded with the band.

What the saxophone does

White Ward are often introduced as "black metal with saxophone". It is a label that sticks, but it does not explain how the compositions work. The decisive question is where the saxophone comes in and how it relates to the guitars. When the guitars compress the space, the saxophone opens it out; yet when the tempo drops, what arrives is not relief but the loneliness that becomes visible as the noise pulls back.

There is a practical story behind this. According to the same interview, the band had wanted a saxophone for a long time but could not find anyone who understood the music and had the technique. In the end they settled on Alexey Iskimzhi, the vocalist of Tectum. The plan was to add saxophone to a few tracks; after hearing the demos, Iskimzhi suggested recording as many melodies as he could. The saxophone takes up so much room on Futility Report because of that suggestion, not because of a formula set in advance.

Love Exchange Failure: isolation in the crowd

After Futility Report the line-up changed almost completely. Kazaryan and Pechatkin stayed, and Pechatkin took on lead vocals as well as bass. Ievgen Karamushko came in on drums, Serhii Darienko on second guitar and Dima Dudko on saxophone. Love Exchange Failure, released on 20 September 2019, was recorded between 2018 and 2019 at Checkpoint Studio and Lipkyzvukozapys, and again at home; Anton Riabchenko did the mixing and mastering.

The label's promotional text gives two references for this album: Bohren & der Club of Gore and Angelo Badalamenti. Both help to explain its sound. The brushed drums and the slow advance of the saxophone recall Bohren's almost motionless doom jazz. The reverberant piano and Stanislav Bobritskiy's keyboards sit close to the night atmosphere Badalamenti built for Twin Peaks. With these passages set right beside the black metal sections, the shift feels less like a change of tempo than a change of place. Three separate guest clean vocalists and Luke Pownall's photographs of the city at night, used throughout the packaging, complete this world.

The relationships on the album are not safe. The title points to a world in which intimacy has turned into an exchange, and even that exchange fails. "Poisonous Flowers of Violence" looks at how violence reproduces itself, "Dead Heart Confession" at the bond between watching horror and numbness. So when an assault follows a soft passage, it reads less as a change of speed than as two opposing reactions of the same person.

The bridge between the two albums was the two-track Debemur Morti EP, released on 25 June 2021 as the label's two hundredth release. Lars Nedland of Borknagar and Solefald sings as a guest on the title track. Valentyn Zhulenko recorded it at Jenny Records and Lipky, and mixing and mastering passed to Alex Sedin in Paris. The cover photograph was by Lucas DeShazer. This is where the team for the next album came together.

False Light: when leaving the city is not enough

False Light, released on 17 June 2022, carries the previous album's question into a different landscape. The album's main literary source is Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's Intermezzo of 1908. According to Pechatkin, who wrote the lyrics, the novella's narrator grows tired of the city, withdraws to the countryside and finds peace by becoming one with nature. White Ward turn the story around: as the band tells it, the album's protagonist also leaves the city for a better life, but at the end of the road he finds a ruined, half-rotten house instead of a warm cabin. DeShazer's cover photograph carries exactly this image. The title refers to Plato's cave; for Pechatkin, false light is the easy path chosen to escape the pain of looking at the truth.

Across eight tracks the album takes on subjects such as state-sanctioned killing, police violence, domestic violence and environmental catastrophe; alongside Kotsiubynsky, Jack Kerouac and Carl Jung are among its references. On "Cronus" Pechatkin uses the myth of Kronos devouring his children as a metaphor for a state machine that swallows its own young. The recordings were again made at Jenny Records, Lipkyzvukozapys and home studios, with mixing and mastering by Sedin. The guest roster widened: Vitaliy Havrilenko, Jay Gambit and Adam Symonds on clean vocals, Jerome Burns on trumpet, Yaroslav Tovarianskyi on double bass, Mykola Lebed on piano and Rhodes.

The opening track, "Leviathan", runs past thirteen minutes; by Kazaryan's account it was one of the first pieces worked on for the album, and it went through a dozen stages before setting the mood of the whole record. This approach has a cost. The many transitions make the pieces hard to take in on a single listen, and in places the atmosphere takes precedence over any particular riff or melody. In return, a well-built transition can change, after the fact, the meaning of what was heard in the section before. At their best, White Ward work on this edge.

Keeping the chronology straight

False Light was finished before Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 and was released about four months after it. To treat the album as a work written about this war is to turn the chronology upside down. In May 2022 Kazaryan told New Noise that neither he nor the world would go back to where things stood at the start of 2022. Later he explained that the next album would also differ from the ideas he had had for a fourth album before the war. The album's images of police violence and the ruined house are heard today in the shadow of the war, but when they were written they were looking at another reality.

This line-up did not last either. Pechatkin left in 2024. In September 2025 Debemur Morti reissued the first three albums in hand-screenprinted sleeves in a numbered box. The text the band wrote for this edition says that a chapter of more than ten years has closed and that the new era began at the moment in 2022 when their lives changed irreversibly, and adds that the next album is slowly taking shape. The box is called A Thorny Path 2017–2022. The band set the closing date themselves.