Where to Start With M., Black Metal’s Ascendant Dark Prince
By
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February 11, 2026
On a clear evening in May 2023, M., the anonymous creative force behind black metal project Lamp of Murmuur, went out for a walk with his touring guitarist. Having just wrapped up a string of European tour dates behind their breakout album Saturnian Bloodstorm, the wandering musician and his cohorts had earned themselves a well-earned rest. It was a respite that lasted all of one moment before he became distracted. “I had a weird, sudden vision in the sky,” he says. “Immediately I told my friend: ‘I need to return right now, because I have a song in my head and I need to record it.’” He rushed to his place, grabbed his guitar and, 10 minutes later, he had his result: “The Dreaming Prince In Ecstasy Part III: The Fall,” recorded in a single take. This spontaneous session spurred more time in the studio, which eventually snowballed into their latest album, last November’s The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy.
The world of underground black metal inspires devotion, but can also be fickle and petulant, with artists never more than a couple of poorly received musical or aesthetic decisions away from alienating their followers. This makes Lamp of Murmuur’s rise in popularity especially noteworthy; over a 12-month period starting in March 2019, the band spawned a wave of demos from their initial Los Angeles base, adhering to many of the well-loved and well-worn conventions of the genre. But ever since, the band has proven restless in exploring black metal’s potential to integrate a diverse spectrum of influences, while retaining the lion’s share of listeners that had been drawn to those murky and melodic demos. From the corners of the darkest clubs to a communion with the night sky, with Lamp of Murmuur, M. has been on a mission to channel every source of inspiration into his music.
Such transcendental eureka moments seem outlandish, but such is M.’s modus operandi; he doesn’t evoke otherworldly forces in his art so much as chase communion with them. “I think people are slowly realizing this is a project where you don’t know what’s coming next,” he says. “Tomorrow I could be doing a straight-up rock album like Yes or Pink Floyd, or Genesis, which are bands that actually influenced The Dreaming Prince a lot.” To anyone ready to dive beyond Lamp of Murmuur’s mainline albums and into the full spectrum of M.’s body of work, none of this will be particularly surprising. M. has shown us across multiple projects, like Silent Thunder, Fuinäehot, and Magus Lord, that a constellation of impulses vie for his focus at any given moment. Sure enough, The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy expands Lamp of Murmuur’s creative vocabulary with elements of prog and neofolk.
Amid all these stylistic switch-ups, M.’s gothic rock obsession (previously showcased on 2021’s Submission and Slavery, which featured Sisters of Mercy-inspired artwork) forms the record’s aesthetic cornerstone. Literally: “My interest has turned to the architecture and overall atmosphere of all these buildings, like the [Cologne cathedral] Kölner Dom,” he says. “There are so many buildings all around Europe that have this very particular and over-the-top architecture that’s both inspiring and intimidating.” He also drew inspiration from William Blake’s poetry (The Angel, penned in 1793, has many parallels to his sky-vision back in ’23), and Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories (particularly The Circular Ruins); it’s surrealistic literature that resonates with his own personal experience. “I became obsessed with visions, hallucinations, dreams, nightmares,” says M. “I buried deep into Sumerian religious practices regarding sleep—how sleep was the language of gods back then, how they had temples built with basements—which were used for the priests and monarchs—to sleep and dream together, to interpret whatever the gods were trying to say to them.”
With these high-gothic gears turning in its heart, The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy is a work of drama and opulence, advancing M.’s mission to interpret the world in the light that Lamp of Murmuur shines into it “I think it’s about accepting the metamorphosis of the project. It isn’t that bedroom black metal project that people remember, just another project that will remain in obscurity.”
Below, we’ve created a guide to take you on a tour through M.’s work, with releases selected to illustrate the ongoing creative experimentation that made The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy possible.
Lamp of Murmuur
The Burning Spears of Crimson Agony
We’ll reflect at length on M.’s stylistic progression in this guide, and it seems crucial that an appreciation of any journey acknowledges where it began. The Burning Spears of Crimson Agony marks the peak of Lamp of Murmuur’s artistic beginnings. The fifth in a series of demos self-released across 2019 and 2020, it sums up M.’s instinctive ability to walk a tightrope between immediacy and fury in a little over 20 minutes, and it was this release that ignited a retroactive fascination with the band’s earlier demos among listeners, and significantly raised expectations of what the first Lamp of Murmuur album could look and sound like.
Lamp of Murmuur
Submission and Slavery
Lamp of Murmuur’s second album proper, Submission and Slavery contains the band’s strongest connective tissue to the genres of post-punk, deathrock, and goth. Beyond this, it highlights another facet of M.’s work that often goes unsung: His knack for off-kilter cover versions. Foregoing more obvious tributes to influences that are immediately apparent on listening to the band, M. instead chooses to reinterpret the works of outré experimentalists from rock music’s fringes such as Dead Can Dance, Current 93—and here, Christian Death’s “As Evening Falls,” a deathrock classic. M.’s version retains its forward momentum, washing it in layer after layer of distortion and reverb that drag the original from the club into the crypt.
Lamp of Murmuur
Punishment and Devotion
Released precisely one day out from Lamp of Murmuur’s second album Submission and Slavery in 2021, this pair of songs offer a less textured, outright furious, 13-minute-long counterpart to the grounded goth and twisted romance of that album. “It’s a more straightforward EP with two songs that are like straightforward black metal—very trashy, very hard-hitting. I think I’m always oscillating between those two aspects of my creations.” Aside from being a fantastic pair of songs, M.’s decision to release Punishment and Devotion under its own banner demonstrates the care and coherence with which he thematically plans and curates his work.
Lamp of Murmuur / Ebony Pendant
Plenilunar Requiems
Throughout Lamp of Murmuur’s existence, M. has used split releases with kindred artists—including Shadow Dungeon, Dai Ichi, and Revenant Marquis—as bridges between larger releases, and for the connective benefits that working with a wide range of artists and labels can offer. These releases are compelling in their own right, but often contain whispers of what might be next for the band. Plenilunar Requiems with Ebony Pendant marked the end of what is presently the middle era of the band, and arguably contains the first instance of a change in vocal approach that, as M. describes, was borne of necessary reinvention.
“After the project started playing more live, I noticed how [my vocal style] was becoming a health hazard, and I had to find a way, find a tool, to be able to express myself in the way that I wanted, without having horrendous situations in which I was spitting blood, unable to speak for days […] I need to express myself, but not at the expense of being able to express myself in the future. And I want this project, as much as possible, to remain my expression.”
Fuinäehot
Secrets of the Godhead
The name Fuinäehot is a coinage of M.’s, and means “enemy that comes from the dark.” Much of M.’s work incorporates improvisations which are often recorded at the moment of inception, and so it was for the drum tracks that set the template for what Fuinäehot would become. The project stemmed from M.’s response to an injury sustained sometime before the recording of Saturnian Bloodstorm that prevented him from playing drums entirely, and a powerful drive to retain his ability with an instrument he loves, “I was so frustrated with not being able to play drums because of my injury and all my pains. I still had this urge, so I said I’m gonna sit down a drum kit, I’m gonna throw a cell phone or a microphone anywhere, and I’m gonna record myself.” Secrets of the Godhead then, is the sound of healing and persistence in real time: “I took those drum tracks, returned to my home, recorded guitar, bass guitars, and some keyboards, and that was it. It was the most urgent, liberating, painful, and resentful project I ever made, and I think you can hear it in how aggressive and almost hateful the project sounds.”
Silent Thunder
Soulspear
Black metal’s baselines of extremity in sound and horror aesthetics can be off-putting to anyone who’s not already attuned to them, and it’s rare to find bands that can embody those key tenets while still creating immediately memorable music with bona fide hooks that a wider audience might enjoy. This is one of the not-so-secrets of Lamp of Murmuur’s rapid growth in popularity; even in the band’s earliest demos M.’s strong melodic sensibilities claw their way out from the fuzz of production.
Silent Thunder, then, is M.’s antidote to this immediacy, steeped in his hidden musical past “I have some projects from the past that are linked to Lamp of Murmuur, which are very atmospheric, long, long-form black metal, with 25-minute-long songs, very pensive, very patient in their nature. It’s funny, because people still don’t know I’m a part of those old projects.” Silent Thunder’s latest release Soulspear gave M. a chance to revisit those introspective tendencies, “I found myself circling back to this need of more reserved black metal, more self-contained, more sober […] Jon [Krieger] from Blackbraid is a great friend of mine, he sent me a message saying how incredible it was to get lost in the woods while it was snowing, listening to the album, just meditating, walking around.”
Magus Lord
In the Company of Champions
The wonder of heavy music is that it’s a country, a continent, a world of divergences and paths less traveled, so it’s perhaps no surprise that M. would take the opportunity to explore beyond black metal’s boundaries. Magus Lord makes use of its songs’ extended runtimes to deliver an entire arcana’s worth of epic fantasy metal, characterised by opalescent synths and periodically soaring vocals. “It’s more nostalgic, it’s adventurous, while still retaining this heavy metal edge—this epic heavy metal feeling—and dabbling in some weird moments, like some more acoustic moments, clean vocals, some weird, almost symphonic senses,” M. says. “It’s an album that’s inspired by the likes of Manilla Road, by the likes of Dio, by early Bathory and all these projects that maybe you listen to when you’re young, and they’re a very foundational thing for you. It’s like the basis for anything you go after later. You can get into more noise, or war metal, or whatever. But then I find myself circling back to those projects of old.”