Review: Heruvim – Mercator
Some works of art are born in peace, carefully nurtured in stillness; others claw their way into existence from the rubble of catastrophe.
Picasso’s Guernica, Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, Celan’s postwar poetry—each is a testament that creation persists even when civilization collapses. One could argue that Heruvim’s Mercator, the Ukrainian band’s first full-length album, belongs to this lineage. Written across borders and recorded amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, under the looming threats of bombardment, conscription, and exile, it feels less like a studio project than an artifact wrested from crisis; a testament that music can outlast even the most dehumanizing machinery of war.
Kick Flis (guitar), Nefarious (vocals/guitar), Hot Rod (bass), and Andrii Sarandi (drums) make up the band. They are not simply another death metal act but a family bound by survival and conviction. They funnel lived reality into their craft: missiles falling, studios shuttered, the constant knowledge that friends may be torn from ordinary life and thrown into battle. Their defiance is not abstract; proceeds from their music have gone directly to aid comrades on the frontlines, transforming riffs into rations and distortion into shelter. In this sense, Mercator is both art and lifeline.
The title itself crystallizes their stance. In Latin, mercator means “merchant,” but in Heruvim’s hands it becomes an indictment: rulers and profiteers as traffickers in human life, cartographers of suffering who redraw the world as a marketplace. From its opening tremolo storms to its closing elegiac swells, the album is haunted by this vision of people reduced to currency—by states; by corporations; by warlords.
Yet the record is not only fury; it is also lament. “Lacrimae Rerum”—“the tears of things,” borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid—serves as its emotional axis. The phrase captures a truth that resonates in every displaced family, every destroyed home: sorrow is not an intrusion upon reality, but woven into its very texture. Heruvim set this to music not through melodrama, but through contemplative passages that evoke both grief and resilience; the moment of quiet reflection before one reenters the fray.
Between these poles lies “VIII,” the eerie interlude that speaks Gorgias of Leontini’s famous paradox:
Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.
In the context of war, the quotation cuts like shrapnel. Language fails: propaganda obscures truth; trauma evades expression, and even the most harrowing testimonies feel inadequate to convey reality. The whispers, footsteps, and spectral repetition transform philosophy into a chilling soundscape, embodying the silence where words collapse.
Musically, Mercator spans the lineage of Pestilence, Death, and Bolt Thrower while refusing to calcify into homage. Tracks like “Mysterium Tremendum” surge with shifting tempos and atmospheric voids; “Nulla Res,” the lead single, threads gnostic speculation through prog-tinged aggression; the title track folds in symphonic piano and cavernous doom passages that expand the album’s scope without diluting its ferocity. Each performance is marked by clarity of intent: gutturals that accent rather than overwhelm; bass lines that cut with stark authority; drums that make each shift feel tectonic.
What makes Mercator extraordinary is not only its technical skill but its coherence of vision. The titles, the interludes, the music, the art—especially Server Terlekchi’s incredible cover—all converge upon the same abyss: a world where the powerful trade in human lives; where grief saturates existence, and where language itself fractures under the weight of atrocity. Heruvim respond not with surrender, but with creation.
Like every great artwork born in the shadow of war, Mercator is more than music. It is testimony. It is defiance. It is the refusal to let silence win. Just as Guernica still wounds the eye, and Shostakovich’s Seventh still resounds, Heruvim inscribe their witness into eternity: grief and rage made audible; resistance made visible. In a world eager to reduce people to commodities, Mercator proves that even amid catastrophe, the human spirit can carve its witness into eternity.
4.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Mercator releases September 12 through Redefining Darkness Records.
