Review by Vinny for In the Woods... - Otra (2025)

In the Woods… have always just ‘been there’. Floating around the periphery of my metal music awareness for years, with me rarely paying them any attention. The progressive tag is usually more than ample to put me off things but given this was dual tagged with gothic metal (another one of my areas of limited interest) and I am trying to broaden my horizons and capture as much new stuff in The Fallen as I can this year, I broke form and went for it. I am glad I did.

What is clear, even as a relative newbie to the band, is that these fellas know how to write songs. There’s obvious depth to all the tracks on this album. Emotional and compositional depth is present in equal amounts, and as a result Otra is an incredibly rich and rewarding album to listen to. There is the mournful atmosphere you would associate with the gothic tag, but there is also the sense of mystery, of some riddle that runs in secret through the album, like there’s always something more to come on each track. It is this narrative of intrigue that keeps my attention on the album from start to finish. This intensity by no means impinges on the overall relaxed vibes that come off the record as it plays. The vocals have a soothing monotone to them, a handsome charm almost. Even on the death doom sounding section of ‘The Crimson Crown’, the menacing vocals are tempered by most of the track being sung in a clean and sultry tone.

I would liken the connection I feel with this record to the same spontaneous response I had to Katatonia’s The Fall of Hearts. I can sense the dark soul behind the music, its presence obvious throughout. As I was ploughing through other releases this week, I got to The Maneating Tree’s latest album, and it just underlined the difference in quality in that Otra is interesting to listen to from the off. Otra lacks much in the way of a generic pigeon-hole to be sat in and as such, all bets are off. The juxtapose of styles somehow remains unintrusive over seven tracks that all seem to flow with an underlying air of calm. Hear the black metal vocals creep into tracks like ‘Things You Shouldn’t Know’ and ‘The Wandering Deity’ whilst enjoying vibrant progressive vibes in some of the guitar at the same time.

For all its free-flowing nature, there is no sense of reckless abandon in the playing. At no point do I feel the need to hit the skip button, which on an album that is infused with gothic and progressive tropes is no mean feat really. There are clunky moments still. ‘A Misrepresentation of I’ stands out for the failed attempt to shoehorn that title into the chorus (it sounds like ‘a misreputation of I’) but it is more than forgivable given it probably is my only negative out of over forty-five minutes of music.