Ghost Bath - Funeral (LP) - Yellow Vinyl

Ghost Bath’s debut album, Funeral, arrived in 2014 on the Chinese label Pest Productions and felt like a dispatch from some frostbitten edge of the internet. At the time, the band let people assume they were from China, which fanned the mystery until the veil dropped the following year and they were revealed as a North Dakota outfit led by vocalist and guitarist Dennis Mikula. That early confusion turned out to be a fitting prelude to the music itself, which floats between beauty and desolation in a way that can feel both intimate and distant at once.

Drop the needle or cue it up in headphones late at night and the first thing that hits is how much shimmer rides on top of the storm. The guitars are drenched in reverb, tremolos carving out bright, aching melodies that glow above the din. Drums surge and pull back, more tide than metronome, and the bass quietly stitches everything together. Mikula’s vocals are a raw, high keening, more texture than literal message. He has said in interviews that he treats his screams as another instrument, and you can hear it here, a human siren call buried in snow. Even within the chaos there is a painterly patience, passages that drift into quiet reflection before the next wave crashes.

Funeral’s reputation grew on Bandcamp shares and message board whispers, the kind of soft chorus that turns a niche record into a cult favorite. The album landed in the wake of blackgaze’s wider breakout, after Deafheaven made bigger waves in 2013, yet Ghost Bath leaned harder into depressive black metal’s solitude. The melodies are clear and memorable, but the feeling is lonelier, like watching city lights from a hill at 3 a.m. The production keeps things raw enough to sting without smearing the details, so when a clean guitar figure peeks through, it reads as fragile rather than glossy. There are moments where the band slows to let a simple theme repeat until it becomes a mantra, and when the full band slams back in, the release is real.

You can hear the blueprint for what came next. Moonlover would pull broader attention in 2015, and Ghost Bath later took their sound to bigger stages, eventually linking with Nuclear Blast and carrying the aesthetic into Starmourner in 2017. Funeral remains the purest statement of their original intent. No grand concept, no expensive studio sheen, just a focused palette of light and shadow. It is the kind of debut that feels like its own weather system, the kind that makes you remember where you were when you first heard it. I first stumbled into it on a rainy afternoon at a small shop that kept a tiny section of Ghost Bath vinyl behind the counter because the records tended to disappear fast. The clerk put on a copy, and by the second track a couple of us were standing still in the aisles, letting it wash over us.

If you are the type who files Alcest and early Agalloch next to your ambient cassettes, this sits right in that sweet spot. The riffs reach for the sublime, then drop you back into the grit. It is easy to imagine why Funeral vinyl still draws crate diggers, and why people keep searching out Ghost Bath albums on vinyl. The tactile ritual suits this music, the way the room fills up and the edges of the guitars blur with your space. If you prefer to buy Ghost Bath records online, you will probably find multiple pressings floating around, and I have seen copies disappear quickly from Melbourne record store websites alongside other vinyl records Australia sellers. Put simply, this is a record that rewards a little patience and a volume knob that can inch past polite.

What keeps me coming back is the way Funeral balances clarity and catharsis. The songs do not try to dazzle with left turns. They build, they bloom, they break, and they leave a halo that lingers after the needle lifts. For a debut from a band that stepped out of the shadows, it has real staying power. If you have room on your shelf, and a taste for black metal that chases light rather than hides from it, this one belongs next to the records you reach for when the night stretches long and you want music that can carry the weight.