Forest Baer and Jon Ramos of Gathering shredding. Hear them live Sunday. (Submitted photo)

When the Central Oregon trio Gathering calls in to Zoom for a chat with The Bulletin, they do so from what appears to be the ultimate black metal band’s practice dungeon — a crammed-in drum kit backdropped by various wall-hangings bearing illegible band logos, all dimly illuminated by light befitting an interrogation room.

It’s a dark place where dark music is made. Gathering is, indeed, a band that specializes in black metal, a subgenre of heavy metal marked by machine-gun drums (known as “blast beats”), speedily guitars that thrash and shimmer, shrieking-demon vocals and beautiful melodies that regularly rise above the din. Black metal started in Europe in the 1980s and ‘90s, and has been evolving ever since, as music does.

Gathering’s band room is not in Europe but in Madras, where drummer Matt Hicks and guitarist Jon Ramos live. Guitarist and vocalist Forest Baer drives up from his home in Bend for practice with his friends, both of whom he has known for many years. Hicks and Baer used to play shows together with their death metal bands Season of Suffering and Existential Depression, respectively; Ramos met them through the extreme metal scene that existed in Central Oregon back then.

“At the time, I wasn’t really that musically inclined, but over time, I started wanting to play music live with other people,” Ramos said. “Eventually, that led me to playing with these guys. It happened really organically.”

Near the end of 2017, the three started a black metal band called Senectuous with another guy, but that band eventually split and Baer moved to Eugene. He moved back to Bend in 2022 and got in touch with Hicks and Ramos, and they formed Gathering, using six songs from their bygone band as a way to jumpstart the new project.

“We just kind of picked back up where we left off, because we knew we wanted to play the same kind of music,” Baer said. “We didn’t have a band meeting about it or anything. We basically just said, ‘We want to play music together and have fun with it.’”

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Over the next few years, Gathering played regular shows around the Northwest and wrote more songs with the aim of finally recording their debut album.

“We had been wanting to get this material recorded for a long time,” Hicks said. “At this point, it’s been eight years since we started Senectuous and started writing that material, so we’ve been anxious to get it out.”

Mission accomplished. On June 6, the band released “Gathering,” a 10-track collection of well-crafted black metal bangers that eschew the genre’s historical tendency toward raw, lo-fi recordings in favor of a cleaner, more atmospheric, almost classically influenced sound. Recorded at Bridge City Sessions in Portland and at producer Cameron Nealey’s studio in Gresham, the album showcases not only the three members’ instrumental prowess, but also a coherent and cohesive aesthetic that fits comfortably within a long tradition of Pacific Northwest black metal bands fixated on the natural world.

Good luck making out Baer’s lyrics through all the howling and growling, but with song titles that cite meadows, mountains, bogs, forests and the solstice, it’s clear where he finds inspiration.

“I have a really strong connection to the land in the Northwest. One of my earliest memories is my dad carrying me down from Diamond Peak covered in mosquito bites and sunburned because I’d been hiking all day,” he said.

“That was me at 5 years old, and basically, that’s what I do with my free time. If I’m not working or playing music, I’m out in the woods doing a gnarly hike and fishing and hunting,” he said. “An appreciation for nature is something that has been passed down for generations in my family. It’s a spiritual thing for me.”

Gathering, with Old Moon, Back From Death and Long Deer: 7 p.m. Sunday, $10, The Capitol, 190 NW Oregon Ave., Bend, instagram.com/gathering__official or facebook.com/gathering.bm.