This one nearly slipped through my filters, which would have been fitting in the saddest way, because slipping through is the story of this band’s life. A promo mail, almost deleted unread. Then one line in the biography stopped me cold: they finished an album with the solos their dead guitarist had already recorded.
Nerumia is a melodic death/black metal band from Lausanne, Switzerland, formed in the early 2000s around Pasquale “Scual” Rivetti and Philippe “Phil” Privet. Two albums came early: The Land of the Black in 2003 and I Don’t Understand in 2007. Then Privet died suddenly in 2009, and the project fell silent for a decade. That is usually where these stories end.
Not this one. Scual rebuilt the band in 2020 with two new members, Magnus and Juan. Two years later, fate repeated itself: Juan Abalo died in 2022, mid-album. The band’s answer is the detail I cannot shake. They completed Senza Realtà in 2023 around the guitar solos Juan had already recorded, so his playing closes the record he never got to finish. Their own words for it: refusing to let silence win. In a genre that performs darkness for a living, here is a band that got handed the real thing twice and answered with work.
Aliénation, out since 25 September 2026 and self-released, is the next chapter: eight tracks, written as a trio with new guitarist Adrien, while Scual keeps carrying concept, lyrics, guitars, drums and lead vocals himself. The melodic death/black blend sits somewhere between the Gothenburg bite and the colder Alpine end of the spectrum, with French-language titles giving it a voice of its own. Switzerland has quietly fed the underground for decades, but it never had a page on this site until today. Fitting that the door opens for a band defined by stubbornness rather than hype, the same reason an Emptiness spends 28 years being nobody’s band and ends up being ours.
Play the title track above. Then go back to Senza Realtà and listen for Juan’s solos, knowing what they are. Music does not get more honest about loss than that.
Listen to this (straight from the band): Nerumia on Bandcamp
