Memorial

Russian blackgaze duo Olhava is back with their sixth studio album. Memorial continues the path opened by Sacrifice. After the burning, there is stillness. Time spent among what remains. Ashes settle, memory lingers, and the question is no longer how to begin again, but what can finally be released. Memorial moves through remembrance toward letting go and acceptance — a quiet reconciliation with what cannot be carried further. It speaks from a single, unpersonified voice: a shared human state shaped by loss, exhaustion, love, and the fragile will to endure. At its center stands a forest hut: not a physical place, but a retreat of the mind. A solitary structure in the woods, an escape from the collapsing outer world, where everything decays, familiar bonds loosen, and people drift apart and return changed. The hut becomes a memorial itself — an obelisk in the forest, a burial site for former lives, a place one returns to alone to contemplate what remains. Inside, memory becomes both refuge and weight. What was meant to be forgotten stays. What was meant to last dissolves. Grief softens into stillness. Unlike Sacrifice, Memorial offers a different kind of rebirth. Rebirth here is indistinct — a quieter transformation found in letting go rather than becoming. Only in its final moments does movement return: a fragile renewal, like thawed water finding its way to a river. Memorial is dedicated to more than one loss. It holds space for the dead, for love that has outlived itself, for time that cannot be returned, for friends forced to flee, and for selves left behind. Its meaning remains open, shifting with each return — a structure in the forest, unchanged, waiting.