Crushingly heavy, in a disturbing musical realm that’s more about atmosphere through dissonance and aggression rather than riffs, tempo, or emotion, Epigrama is not exactly the kind of album that walks up, shakes your hand, and politely introduces itself. It grabs you by the collar, drags you into a concrete basement, and lets the walls do the talking.

The album has a violent element, maybe because there are really only two vocal approaches here: a harsh yell or a metal growl. Between that and the fact that it’s all sung in Lithuanian, it leaves a lot of room for interpretation for listeners who don’t speak the language. That distance actually adds to the effect. The vocals become less about direct lyrical meaning and more about texture, impact, and atmosphere.

The guitar playing is disorientating, moving between drone-like landscape riffs and dissonant melodies that create an unsettling vibe throughout the album. Rather than offering easy hooks or traditional riff payoffs, Erdve lean into discomfort. The music feels like it is shifting under your feet, sometimes slowly, sometimes with sudden force.

In my opinion, that approach draws more attention to the drums. They are played in a consistent way that keeps you grounded among the chaos of the other instruments. Still powerfully heavy, the drumming acts as an anchor point that you can wrap your head around while everything else seems to bend, crack, and collapse around it. This also makes the music a good representation of the album cover: inhuman yet humane at the same time.

The artwork for Epigrama sits in that creepy realm where it’s so close to looking human that it becomes strange because it clearly isn’t human. The dripping concrete or papier-mâché substance covering the individuals on the album cover is unsettling because it’s so simple, yet it has clearly taken time to put together. That makes it a strong visual match for the music itself. There is something familiar buried inside the ugliness, but it has been distorted enough to feel wrong.

“Nyra,” which has been released as one of the singles from the album, has a really interesting weight in the guitar playing. There is a constant guitar presence under the melody line that doesn’t really seem to begin or end, but remains through the entire track. You don’t really hear it get picked, yet it seems to last through the whole verse like some massive shape humming in the background.

The dissonantly catchy cleaner guitar lines, in contrast to the immense backing guitar, create an environment that makes “Nyra” my pick for favourite song on the album. It captures what Erdve do well here: making something heavy without relying only on speed or obvious aggression. The weight comes from mood, texture, and tension.

I also like the use of space in “Skepsis.” Under the drone-like guitar work, there is a pause for definition in the riff, which is an interesting approach. Letting space become part of the riff gives the song an extra level of unease. It is not just what the band plays, but what they leave hanging in the air.

The song “Trukme” has an interesting electronic section that caught me off guard. The industrial element in the outro feels appropriate, but it also introduces a new territory for the album. It does not feel thrown in just to be weird. It fits the record’s overall atmosphere and gives the back half of the album another texture to work with.

As Epigrama progresses, it becomes disorientating in a different way. Some of the riffs become a little more choppy and almost djent-like. That shift helps the album evolve as it goes along, rather than staying locked into one approach from start to finish. For a record built so heavily on atmosphere and discomfort, those changes matter.

As the feedback fades, Erdve have created an album with a lot of dissonance and a heavy environment. I found I needed to listen to it from different perspectives. My first couple of listens were spent analyzing the instruments, trying to understand the individual parts. But as I listened more, it became less about the riffs and specific sections, and more about the environment the album creates.

Epigrama is a disorienting album with its own unique space worth entering and getting lost in. It may not be an easy listen, and it is not designed to hand out quick rewards, but for those willing to sit inside its ugly, oppressive atmosphere, Erdve offer something heavy, strange, and unsettling.