Dmitry Marchenko has been building his own world since he started releasing music as Këkht Aräkh, and Morning Star, out March 27 on Sacred Bones Records, is the clearest view of that world yet. It is a black metal record that holds a conversation with the genre’s most isolationist instincts while leaving the door cracked for something warmer. That warmth does not dilute the darkness here. It makes it more convincing.

Recorded between Berlin and Stockholm, Morning Star is Marchenko’s third album, and it opens with the same lo-fi analog warmth that has always defined his approach. The production is deliberately rough around the edges. There is hiss and texture in the recordings, and it gives the music the feeling of something discovered rather than manufactured. This is not a polished metal record trying to communicate raw feeling. It actually feels raw.

The most-discussed moment is “Eternal Martyr,” a collaboration with Swedish artist Bladee, who contributes vocals and co-wrote lyrics for the track. Bladee’s clean, softly sung passages sit against the black metal instrumentation in a way that should not work and somehow does. Marchenko described the pairing as offering “a new perspective for black metal: renewed, reframed for the present moment.” That is not promotional language inflating a gimmick. The track earns its ambition.

Elsewhere, the album balances fierce passages with quieter, more melodic moments. There are ballads and acoustic sections that let the record breathe without breaking its mood. “Castle” has been singled out as a defining statement, and it holds up on repeated listening as one of the album’s most fully realized pieces. The three-part structure Marchenko builds over the record’s full runtime gives Morning Star a sense of progression that a lot of extreme music loses in its commitment to intensity.

The album does occasionally lose pacing in its middle section, where the influence pulling from outside black metal creates some unevenness. Not every fusion lands as cleanly as “Eternal Martyr.” But the ambition on display here, and the emotional candor underneath the corpse-paint aesthetic, makes those miscalculations feel like the cost of doing something genuinely adventurous rather than playing it safe.

Morning Star is Këkht Aräkh’s best work, and it is the most honest argument the project has made for what black metal can hold. Marchenko is building toward something. This record makes you want to find out where it goes.