In dir valorn betten si Woid und Föd
ei in de Dunkelheit von deina Wöt
Night has a way of making the world feel newly enchanted and newly dangerous. The familiar road, the old woods, the edge of town, the last little smear of light over the horizon: all of it begins to shift once the first star appears. For Brånd, the Upper Austrian weird/post-black metal project from Linz, that hour becomes a threshold on “Da Erste Stern,” the second single from the forthcoming debut full-length Tåg & Nåcht.
Started in 2015 as the solo project of Vritra, also of Kringa and Weathered Crest, Brånd began as a way to escape perfection and prescribed boundaries. Over the last decade, the project has wandered from crude black metal to lo-fi ambient, from ferocious post-punk to psych downer rock, with split releases alongside underground acts such as Absolute Key, Calvary, and Rosa Nebel. Now joined by other musicians to push old and new ideas further, Brånd’s first full-length has grown out of 4-track demos collected over the years, expanding the project’s raw beginnings into something far more richly arranged.
“Da Erste Stern” opens with a fuzzy bass throb, glowing key sighs, and bell-like chimes, setting a tone that feels somber, romantic, and faintly ceremonial. It has the feeling of entering some candle-lit inner chamber, or stumbling into an elven forest where the moss gives off its own private light. There is also something of the wide-open rural night in it, the kind of night with little light pollution, where the Milky Way seems to breathe across the black veil above the fields.
The song takes its time before fully revealing itself. When the guitars arrive, they cascade rather than merely crash, carrying a shudder of old German punk and post-punk through the track’s more sacred, ritualistic mood. The vocals scrape and declaim, but their abrasion is softened by the song’s strange devotional pull, with layered harmonies pushing the piece toward something communal and spellbound. Somewhere in the mix, one can hear echoes of The Cure around the Faith era, a bit of Lowlife’s romantic gloom, the stern punk ache of EA80, old prog rock, krautrock, and a pagan folk-metal instinct that recalls Isengard.
That may sound like too many ingredients for one cauldron, but Brånd makes it feel weirdly natural.
The video for “Da Erste Stern,” filmed in a hazy blue wash, deepens the song’s nocturnal spell. It opens with a crescent moon glimpsed through bare branches, as if the camera has found a secret aperture into the night. From there, the imagery moves between blurred lights, wooded darkness, candlelit interiors, and spectral performance footage. The band appears kaleidoscopic through fog and soft focus, surrounded by amplifiers, candles, framed pictures, and an almost chapel-like haze. At times, the performers look less like a band playing in a room than figures caught in some private rite, their instruments and microphones half-swallowed by cobalt mist and small red points of light.
There are images of branches, reflections, stone steps, glowing walls, and what appears to be a miniature gothic landscape, with wrought-iron forms and a purple-blue sky looming behind them. The camera lingers on hands, strings, faces, and smoke until the border between outdoor night and indoor ritual begins to dissolve. Everything seems damp, blurred, and enchanted, like a memory of a show played in a forest shrine after midnight. It is a fitting visual companion to a song that treats darkness as both a landscape and a state of mind.
Watch the video for “Da Erste Stern” below:
Brånd’s Tåg & Nåcht is out May 29, 2026, via AVANT! Records, with Tour De Garde handling the US/CA split release.
Listen to “Da Erste Stern” below and pre-order and pre-save Tåg & Nåcht here.
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The post Into the Darkness — Linz Austria’s Brånd Burns Like Starfire in Video for “Da Erste Stern” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.