Loja, Ecuador isn't a place black metal history usually stops, but Wampyric Rites have been working there since 2019, and the trio has been remarkably industrious about it: 37 releases in under seven years, most of them short, raw, and gone before you've fully placed them.
Under the Tragic Fullmoon of the Vampire, out on the Lithuanian label Inferna Profundus Records on 13 February 2026, is the one to actually sit with. Eleven tracks and the best part of an hour, sung mostly in Spanish, it plays like a survey course in the genre's own history: the hiss and tape-hollow production of Beherit's earliest tapes, the melancholic tremolo of Lamp of Murmuur's demo years, filtered through a band that clearly grew up worshipping both.
What keeps it from being pure pastiche is the guitar. Where a lot of raw black metal hides behind its own murk, Wampyric Rites let the lead lines cut through, shredding in a way that owes as much to the genre's more virtuosic corners as to its lo-fi ones. The riffs are melodic without softening the record's atmosphere; the vampiric imagery, all fullmoons and sanguine emperors, stays gothic rather than campy.
The album's title track sits in English, a clearing amid the Spanish-language surroundings, and the record closes on a cover of Behexen's "Night of the Blasphemy," a nod toward the Finnish scene that clearly shaped the band's sense of menace.
None of this reads as an accident of taste. Wampyric Rites draws its personnel from Ecuador and the wider South American underground, a regional scene that rarely gets the same attention as its European counterparts despite having produced work of comparable seriousness for years. Under the Tragic Fullmoon of the Vampire doesn't ask for that recognition so much as it simply behaves as though it already has it.
It's a lot of record for a band with this much back catalogue to sift through, which is rather the point.
