Volahn – Popol Vuh (Black Twilight Circle, 2025)

Josh Welvaert

Music Journalist

“Popol Vuh” was a book that was written between the years 1554 and 1558. It chronicles the Mesoamerican folktales of the creation of humankind, the actions of the gods, the origin and history of the K’iche’ people, and the chronology of their kings down to 1550. It is also the name of the newest sprawling, violent, intense, melodic, authentic, and original album from contemporary California black metal legend Eduardo Ramírez, better known as Volahn.  

For more than a decade, Volahn has stood at the center of the Black Twilight Circle, a loose collective of Chicano and Indigenous artists using black metal as a vessel for cultural reclamation. Where so much of the genre still fixates on Nordic or Teutonic mythology, Volahn turns his gaze southward — to Palenque, Tikal, and Xibalba — resurrecting Mayan cosmology through raw guitars, ritual drumming, and hallucinatory melody. Popol Vuh feels less like a traditional metal record and more like an act of invocation, an offering to ancestral memory conducted through distortion and spiritual noise. The full-on sonic assault makes me imagine legions of the shadowed dead marching beneath the earth at the command of the ancient gods while the drums of war sound.  

What truly defines “Popol Vuh” is how cinematic and narrative it feels. Volahn uses the black metal framework to chart a mythic descent into the underworld, paralleling the story of the Hero Twins, Hunahpú and Xbalanqué, from the original “Popol Vuh.” The songs breathe like chapters, giving each song an incredible push-pull effect, as if each track is like a rebirth from fire to transcendence. Many of the tracks on here will have a one to two-minute acoustic passage invoking native instruments and the low hum of the jungle. This gives the album a truly monolithic tone in sound and scale.  

Tracks like “The Beheading by Camazotz” and “Cosmic Duality” act as focal points of this mythic structure. The former is dedicated to Vordb of Les Légions Noires, bridging Volahn’s lineage of influence from French underground mysticism to Mesoamerican divinity. Cosmic duality replicates the sound of death transfigured into cosmic rebirth. Across the album, Volahn’s voice shifts from a harsh, commanding growl to almost a shamanic chant, breaking away from the traditional nihilism of black metal and going in an almost reverent direction.  

Volahn’s “Popol Vuh” is a masterful blend of traditional Mayan and contemporary instruments that makes the ancient mythology of the “Popol Vuh” feel alive and powerful for today.