Darkher - The dark apocalypses of the red-haired muse

British musician Jayn H Maiven has established herself in the dark-folk scene as one of the most promising dark muses of the 2010s, alternating sprawling passages bordering on ambient with explosive bursts of doom and post-rock violence. Her rituals are built around a pagan spirituality and a fascination with decay that oscillates between hope and desolation

by Valerio D'Onofrio

Jayn H Maiven is a British musician who established herself in the dark-folk scene in 2014 with a mere 22-minute EP that marked her out as one of the most promising dark muses of the 2010s, alternating sprawling passages bordering on ambient with explosive bursts of doom and post-rock violence. Her rituals are built around a pagan spirituality and a fascination with decay that oscillates between hope and desolation. She began her career as the voice of Steals, but soon set off on a solo path under the moniker Darkher, which gave her the freedom to pursue her own projects without the inevitable compromises that come with being part of a band.

Steals was a necessary step in my development. I needed to change and take that leap into the unknown in order to grow as a musician and an artist.

(J H Maiven)

darkher Her songs are built on brief guitar arpeggios, dark landscapes and witch-like vocals, with a charisma and hypnotic power that recall something between her two peers Chelsea Wolfe and Anna von Hausswolff, right through to the apocalyptic folk of the duo Gira–Jarboe. What's striking — especially in her live performances — is the gap between her fragile, almost ethereal appearance, framed by extremely long red hair, and her ability to draw in the eyes and ears of an audience as if hypnotized by a voice and a flow that pulls you along, like a psychedelic trip, into a world shaped by a pagan spirituality that puts nature and isolation front and centre. At the same time, that same duality runs through her music, which is restless and serene at once, as dark as nightmares yet as soothing as dreams, where the darkness of the arrangements and lyrics neither torments nor oppresses, but instead suspends the listener outside of reality thanks to a magnificent voice and simple, minimal guitar arpeggios.

Enlisting drummer Christopher Smith and guitarist Daniel Land, she debuted in 2014 with the EP The Kingdom Field, which gathered three tracks released in semi-clandestine fashion in 2013 (on a self-produced, self-titled EP) alongside one new song. Four tracks of flawless dark-folk that immediately hinted at enormous potential. Among them stands out the gorgeous "Hung", with guitar and voice stripped down to the bare essentials and no other instrumentation. The angelic voice and the song's slow pace make the notes feel as though they come from a world on the border between light and darkness, between death and hope. "Foregone" became one of her signature tracks, so much so that it was revisited on the following LP, here fleshed out with drums and bass and a more driving rhythm. The pace is relentless, like a march that leads us — through a despairing vocal performance — toward themes of death and inner suffering. "Ghost Tears" is a ballad that would have fit perfectly on one of Chelsea Wolfe's LPs, while the closer is the new, entirely instrumental track "The Kingdom Field", which gives the album its title.

darkher2016 Despite its brevity, the EP reveals a knack for writing songs with real impact and a fully dark atmosphere, a trait that is further amplified on her mature, breakthrough album Realms (2016). Wissenberg ramps up the power and atmosphere and seems to discover many of the elements that made post-rock's fortune. There are no shortage of moments recalling Godspeed You! Black Emperor, from the slow intros to the towering sweep of the final crescendos. The Darkher project thus arrives at a particularly successful alchemy of dark-folk, post-rock and doom that can be aching (the alienating vocals), violent (the hammering final riffs) and minimal (the intros poised between minimal folk and ambient) all at once.

The slow introduction of "Spirit Waker" precedes the martial rhythms of "Wars", laden with pathos and solemnity, and the despairing "Moths", with its slow, powerful finale: episodes that clearly convey the sense of this new path, one with no stasis but a gradual evolution of tracks that change radically over the course of a few minutes while always retaining the same dark identity. The songs share a similar structure, at times darker ("Buried", split into two parts), at times more decisively post-rock ("Hollow Veil"), but always united by the violence of their endings.

When melancholy takes over, it does so through the classy folk of "Lament" and "The Dawn Brings A Saviour". There's a philosophy running through the lyrics, that sense of otherness and alienation typical of the gothic world, where the fascination with death or solitude stems from a refusal to accept rampant youth culture or the dictatorship of "fun", where refuge for this "other" generation lies in the allure of decay, much as for the Romantics of the 19th century it lay in the allure of ruins (the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, for instance).

The Buried Storm (2022), released a full six years after the previous "Realms" (2016), shows a more mature musician in search of more intimate sonorities and poetic, enigmatic lyrics. "Sirens Nocturne" opens the album with a dark-ambient drone over which strings and a whispered vocal are layered, turning by the end into something close to a religious invocation. The track moves forward largely unchanged for over four minutes, essentially becoming pure dark atmosphere.

"Lowly Weep" begins, a quintessential Jayn H Maiven track. A slow introduction built on cello forms the foundation for a relentless crescendo that culminates in a slow, hammering doom finale. This is the typical Darkher formula, repeated across other tracks as well, the best on the album. Among them is "Love's Sudden Death", at once majestic and macabre, able to combine the electric sonorities of Chelsea Wolfe with the mournful ballad tone of Marissa Nadler. In a similar vein, though in some ways a tragic high point, is "Immortals", the absolute distillation of Maiven's dark poetics, more melodic in its first half before building to an unmissable close somewhere between dark and a post-rock crescendo of guitar and strings.

The other tracks lean closer to dark-folk, but do so with a recognizable style ("Where The Devil Waits", "The Seas"), with angelic vocals submerged in the deepest black.