Review: CMPT – Na Utrini

One-man-bands are all too often a mixed bag of ambition and limits. CMPT proves that there a gems to be found, even in solo-black metal projects. With “Na utrini” CMPT opens a doorway not merely into sound, but into folk memory, ancestral memory, and landscape memory. It is a slow-burning ritual.

Clocking in at just under 50 minutes, the album feels vast without overreaching. The title track, nearly ten minutes long, sets the tone with deliberate pacing. It’s not designed to attack but to envelop. The guitars shimmer and dissolve like mist over riverbanks, slowly building through layered chords, steady drum pacing, and dissonant vocal lines that drift in and out of focus. The effect is trance-like—not ambient, but certainly atmospheric.

CMPT doesn’t rush. Each composition develops organically, as if shaped by wind and water over time. “Oppidum Panuka” and “Crna voda” ramp up the tension with sharpened guitars and galloping rhythms, but even these more aggressive pieces carry the same sense of haunted restraint. They don’t explode so much as unravel.

Where the album distinguishes itself is in its textural choices. Folk influences are woven subtly throughout. Instead of dominating the soundscape, they haunt it: a brief flute motif here, a field recording or rustic cadence there. One interlude is built almost entirely from such textures, acting like a doorway between worlds – bridging the harsh, percussive exterior with something older, more earthen, and spiritual.

Vocals are sparse and often buried, not out of laziness but intent. When they do surface, they are raw and desperate, the language indistinct but the emotion unmistakable. The voice becomes another instrument – half a narrator, half a witness.

There’s a cinematic arc to “Na utrini”. Tracks like “Mesečina” and “U raljama košave” feel like transitional scenes in a broader story, while “Kao srp u noći”, turns out to be the album’s centerpiece. Slow, deliberate, mournful, making it sound less like a song and more like a ritual unfolding in real time. It’s here that CMPT’s vision coalesces: black metal not as aggression, but as recollection.

The production deserves particular praise. It’s raw, but not in the overly compressed, hollow sense that plagues many one-person projects. There’s depth: room for guitar trails to decay naturally, for dry and distant drums, and an eerie atmosphere.

“Na utrini” isn’t concerned with innovation in the traditional sense. Its originality lies in how it inhabits its space – between folk and black metal, between the personal and the ancestral, between land and sky. It doesn’t shout out it’s anger and innjury, instead murmurs from a field where ruins used to stand.

“Na utrini” is an album witha a strong mood and resonates long after the final note.