This week on ONE-TO-WATCH we have Austere Days who hail from the gothic and archaic, cobbled streets of Edinburgh, Scotland. Austere Days is Miska Aunala, a solo project who plays a unique and bereaved style of electronic, doom leaden music that creeps and grows on you like ivy, crawling and constricting around your limbs and torso, suffocating you with its dark and inert atmosphere.

Away is about losing hope, and the music of Austere Days captures all that disquiet, with its downcast and synthesised undertones, all the time haunted by sombre piano keys that layer heavily over the fuzzy, electronic drone. The vocals style is as much narrated as it is sung, such is it's deadpan delivery. It wails and weeps beside sludge-driven distortion, all performed at a funereal pace. It’s doom-gazed, dreary mood weighs heavy all the way through the track and portrays a bleak and sullen landscape. However, if you are like me, and thrive on dark, shoegazing atmospherics, then Austere Days is one to watch. There was another track entitled How/Why, which was released earlier in the month which is also worth your time and your blackened heart.

The track Away is currently available on the Austere Days Bandcamp page, with an ambient and instrumental version to follow later in the month. So, make sure you keep an eye out for more interesting single releases here on The Smashing Skull Sessions new ONE-TO-WATCH mini-series!.