REVIEW

The second album from Enola, a shoegaze band hailing from Surabaya, Indonesia. The current lineup consists of three members: Adi Fikri (Dr/Vo), Ayis (Gt), and Dwiki (Ba/Vo). Formed in 2019, the band began when Ayis—formerly a member of the hardcore outfit War Fighters—invited the other two to join the project.

Following the beautiful and expansive atmosphere of their debut Does Anyone Else, Enola take a decisive turn toward darker territory on Commit Death, exploring heavy themes such as death, heartbreak, desire, and regret. The opening track, #1 “Light That Never Goes Out by Mariusz Lewandowski,” is an instrumental piece exceeding eleven minutes. Distorted guitars toll endlessly like funeral bells, evoking the image of a final journey into the afterlife.

Next comes #2 “Darak (Vicarious Trauma),” a slow-tempo, oppressive strain of doomgaze in which massive guitar riffs surge forward in waves. Between the repetitions, fragile clean arpeggios and ghostly, hollow vocals surface, offering a fleeting sense of release from suffocation—only for that voice, tinged with a sweet yet poisonous allure, to slowly corrode the listener from within.

On #3 “Infernal,” delicate clean vocals intertwine with brutal screams against a backdrop of crushing distortion. #4 “Repent” introduces a female vocal presence, blooming like an alluring flower in the darkness. Tracks such as #6 “Lambda (λ)” and #7 “Lambbda,” which rein in distortion in favor of a more dreamlike beauty, remain slow and decadent throughout, yet are rich in dynamic contrast and spatial depth, never allowing the tension to dissipate.

The album closes with #8 “I Will Never Recover,” a beautiful piano ballad. Its gentle tone initially suggests a happy resolution—until the lyrics deliver a devastating revelation: “I was not in a dark place, I was the dark place” What arrives at the end is not salvation, but the shocking realization that the self is the very source of despair. An utterly devastating ending—truly a perfect descent into melancholy.

This is a formidable work that skillfully fuses the delicate lyricism of post-rock and slowcore with the crushing heaviness of doomgaze and post-metal. Discovering a band from Southeast Asia so perfectly aligned with my own tastes was a genuine blind spot. Fans of Spotlights, Holy Fawn, or Chelsea Wolfe should take note.

On a personal level, Enola’s evident respect for Type O Negative is particularly compelling—the band has even shared posts commemorating Peter Steele’s death anniversary on Facebook. With closer listening, hints of a gothic sensibility reminiscent of October Rust and Bloody Kisses begin to emerge, especially on “Darak (Vicarious Trauma). That may be subjective, of course—but the resemblance is hard to ignore.

Enola are scheduled to embark on a large-scale Asian tour in 2025, with Japanese dates already confirmed as part of the itinerary. Given the exceptional level of refinement they have achieved as a doomgaze/post-metal act emerging from Southeast Asia, considerable attention is warranted as to how they will translate their music’s weight and tension into a live setting.

[Updated: 9/8/2025] Enola’s Japan tour has officially been confirmed.