Thy Catafalque (HU)

About

For over two decades, Tamás Kátai has been quietly building one of the most singular projects in avant garde metal under the name Thy Catafalque, founded in Makó, Hungary back in 1998. What started as a black metal outfit has evolved into something genuinely hard to categorise, pulling in Hungarian folk music, electronic passages, jazz, progressive rock and ambient textures alongside the expected extremity. Since co founder János Juhász left in 2011, Kátai has run things largely solo, calling in a rotating cast of guest musicians to flesh out recordings that can shift from crushing metal to cinematic folk within a single album. Signed to Season of Mist, the project has put out a string of acclaimed records that each push the sound somewhere new. Sgùrr drew on the Scottish Highlands landscape from when Kátai lived in Edinburgh, while Alföld in 2023 marked a deliberate turn back toward heavier, more extreme territory. The twelfth studio album, XII: A gyönyörű álmok ezután jönnek, arrived in late 2024 with more than twenty guest musicians and earned album of the month in the German edition of Metal Hammer.