(written by Islander)
This has been one of those rare weekends when, due to some other plans falling through, I had a ton of time to immerse myself in new metal and spew out a bunch of thoughts in print. Yesterday I compiled music from 8 bands, and today I’ve got 6 (I did have 8 but ran out of writing time). These bands, of course, exhibit their creativity through varying shades and phases of black metal — except the last one, a final curveball for you.
This collection includes three complete EPs as well as enticing excerpts from records not yet out. I hope you’ll give them all a chance.
BLUT AUS NORD (France)
Last week brought us a second advance song from Blut Aus Nord’s new album Ethereal Horizons. The first one, “Shadows Breathe First” (reviewed here), was spectacular. This one is too.
In one aspect it’s like the audio equivalent of an eye-popping Perseid meteor shower, turning a night sky into a horizon-spanning field of streaking light. In another aspect it’s as if the blazing projectiles were large enough to survive the atmosphere and bombard the ground.
The music is vast and engulfing, and singing voices sound celestial themselves, but the cascading melodies, the heaving and jolting chords, and the vividly spearing leads create a feeling of dread, of impending ruin, and harrowing, crackling snarls amplify the music’s feelings of fear and despair. Even those soaring choral voices begin to sound devastated.
Nearer the end, the music softens and becomes meditative — muted and musing, lonesome and unhopeful. In the music’s celestial reaches, however, the sounds wondrously glitter.
Well, it seems BaN named the song “The Ordeal” for a reason.
Ethereal Horizons will be released by Debemur Morti Productions on November 28th.
https://blutausnord.bandcamp.com/album/ethereal-horizons
https://www.facebook.com/Vindsval.official/
KRALLICE (U.S.)
Anyone who has followed the extensive career of Krallice knows they are musical shapeshifters, restlessly creative and talented enough to turn a multitude of ideas into a multitude of realities. Sometimes it seems to depend on who among them is playing the lead role in the songwriting, as well as (of course) changes of mood and inspiration as time and life go on.
A more scholarly student than I of Krallice’s records would do a better job placing their latest EP No Hope (released just a couple of days ago) within the contours of their past musical excursions. I’ll just do what I always do, and blurt out immediate impressions formed during the throes of listening.
The first of the two songs, “Inner Peace“, doesn’t sound like what its title portends. Like Blut Aus Nord’s song above, the music creates engulfing cascades of shining sound, but those musical currents also seem to writhe in torment above feverish percussion and wild screams and yells.
The instrumentation flashes and flickers, churns and burns, hammers and throbs, whirls and convulses. It’s a surreal and even deranged experience, as if channeling confusion and mental meltdown. The vocals remain unhinged, and while the music does soften (with a vivid bass melody playing a lead role), it also spins up and out into elaborate but surreal displays of dissonance and dementia, backed by electrifying drumwork and feverish bass maneuvers.
The EP’s second track, the voiceless “Protean Pulse“, is a nearly 16-minute odyssey, one that uses multi-layered synths and crashing cymbals to create chilling and even alien futuristic visions, Vangelis-like in their resonance. But those cymbal crashes and bursts of shrill quivering sound, as well as groaning undercurrents and ominous percussive rumbles, also make the experience distressing.
The flow is slow, the ambience cinematic, the effects somewhere between spellbinding and nerve-wracking. The music also occasionally pauses, as if reaching an end, but then resumes in its seeming portrayal of cosmic mysteries both wondrous and perilous. Immense low-end detonations and groaning drones add to both the grandeur and the danger generated by the piercing sound field of ethereal sparkles and chimes, and a detectable protean pulse that slowly descends.
Still shapeshifters for sure, that’s what these two songs prove again about Krallice when heard back-to-back.
P.S. The day after I posted this column I saw a social media post by Gilead Media that read this way: “Our old friends Krallice will be artist in residence for Roadburn Fest 2026. They will perform three sets over the course of the weekend. One for early material. One for their recent material. And one for new music commissioned by Roadburn.” That’s an honor, and one that’s been earned. Also something to look forward to eagerly for those who can make Roadburn 2026.
https://krallice.bandcamp.com/album/no-hope
https://www.facebook.com/krallice/
THOKKIAN VORTEX (Int’l)
I was quite taken with this band’s last album, Thy Throne Is Mine (2020). I haven’t heard all of their new one, Lucifer Lucem Proferens, but Folter Records’ description of the music at Bandcamp promises considerable genre-jumping variation within a black metal framework. And so the one song that’s now streaming probably isn’t entirely representative of everything else, but it stands alone quite strongly — in part because even as a single song it encompasses many variations.
That song, “Shadowmother“, gradually builds and then twists and turns. The band launch it with a piercing tonal throb against a muted gossamer backdrop, and then strengthen the pulse with both bass and drums, while also introducing a piercing lead guitar that seems to wail.
Just before ugly, splintered-ice vocals arrive (like the extremity of a strangling goblin), the synth-enhanced music becomes increasingly expansive in its scope and brilliant in its tones, and the drums launch into blasting mode. Still macabre, the snarling vocals almost sing; the drums cavort in a variety of ways; the vividly sparkling and dangerously churning music begins to sound diabolically joyful.
The music starts throbbing again, a fiendish kind of pulse, but it also sizzles and swarms. The keyboards add their own futuristic electro-throb but also brightly and elegantly ripple and ring. Orchestral overlays create a sweeping expanse once more, just in time for the drums to go wild, and for a wild guitar solo to reach gloriously (but maniacally) for the clouds.
Yes indeed, an extremely varied and generally eye-popping experience in the space of one song.
https://folterrecords.bandcamp.com/album/lucifer-lucem-proferens
https://www.facebook.com/ThokkianVortex
ETĚR (Poland)
Etěr is a new Polish formation with a debut EP named Cichość światów released a couple of weeks ago. It drew my attention because Etěr is another project of Ø Grémium, who is also behind Ùna and Toska, whose music I’ve written about in the past, and another recent project I’ll have more to say about next week.
The EP’s cover art is also fantastic, and that was a further inducement toward the music. I’ve learned that both the visuals and the lyrics were chosen as Etěr‘s homage to giants of Polish art from the turn into the 20th century — identified on Bandcamp as Jan Kasprowicz, Tadeusz Kubiak, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (the creator of the EP’s surreal cover painting), and Andrzej Żuławski.
Three songs long, the EP leads with “Przez“, which might mean something like “through” or “across” in English (Etěr seems to translate as “Ether”). It’s a daunting, towering, searing, and near-overpowering experience. The malignantly roaring and rabidly howling vocals are thoroughly macabre, but not more so than the unpredictable drum-and-bass contortions or the surreal, screaming guitar mania, which sometimes sound like the wail of sirens and sometimes like gleaming blood-spray from severed arteries or the chiming of dissonant bells.
The music also suddenly jolts, heavily undulates, woozily meanders, and dizzyingly dances, even as the elaborate swarm of high-frequencies continues broiling away the listener’s sanity.
“Pryzm” (probably “prism”) follows “Przez”. It’s short and somewhat less overpowering, but its shifting tonal collage is also surreal. No vocals intrude into the sonic dementia until near the end, when monstrously distorted spoken words finish things off.
The final song, “Wszystkość” (perhaps “everything”) shifts back toward the breathtaking, brain-spinning, densely layered, range-spanning extravagances of “Przez”, once again marked by vivid and unpredictable bass-and-drum acrobatics and monstrous vocal reverberations. This song also proves to be a slugger, and feverishly darting and deliriously quivering high-end tones also turn out to be bright hooks.
Listening to the EP often feels like being caught in a whirlpool of unearthly origin, a dangerous and demented but exhilarating spin very close to jagged rocks. By the way, an online translator says the EP’s name means “The Silence of the Worlds“.
https://eter-jje.bandcamp.com/album/cicho-wiat-w
https://www.instagram.com/o_gremium/
TEUFELNACHT (Germany)
I don’t speak German any more than I do Polish, but I can again use the internet to translate. And so I see that Teufelnacht probably means “devil night” in my native tongue and that “folter” means torture, which gives meaning to the name of Teufelnacht’s new EP, Folterplanet, which the Crawling Chaos label released just in time for the devil-night revels that will arrive next Friday.
The EP’s opener “Waldemar Daninsky” (apparently named for the Polish werewolf portrayed by Paul Naschy in a host of horror films decades ago) is indeed a devilish affair. It strides on punk-like beats and heavy throbs, segmented with blasting bursts, and it delivers cruelly scathing riffage and punk cries that are feral and fractured. But the music also wickedly writhes, wildly sparks, dismally moans, eerily wails, brutishly chugs, and flares like a sudden bonfire.
In other words, Teufelnacht pack a hell of a lot of sensations into that one song, harnessed within an overarching atmosphere of supernatural horror. Many of the EP’s other song titles likewise connect with old horror movies, and they’re similarly multi-faceted, if not more so.
For example, the slow and spooky sounds of brass and woodwinds open “Frankenstein” before it explodes and lurches. Eerily bright organ keys, haunting horns, and channel-shifting sung words also appear in the midst of the mayhem, along with lots of cleverly meandering bass notes.
The instrumental “Schwarze Messe” sounds like a grisly old waltz among corpses; “Black Metal raus aus Deutschland“, on the other hand, is a blazing punked-up romp, tailor-made for a quick circle pit; “Vampir” seems like a different kind of dance, medieval but also punk, and with choral and martial voices and diabolical guitar ecstasies in the mix.
“Mumie” is likewise hard to pin down. It creates a thrilling intertwining of styles and sounds (including continued vocal variation), like the conjoined revelries (and grieving) of the old and the new, of peasants and vandals, of nightmare beings and modern delinquents. It also include haunting and witchy keys. And at last “Folterplanet” draws this fascinating EP to a close with deep and solemn spoken words in the midst of slow and steady thumps and a collage of shimmering and warbling melodies.
Come Samhain, you should be remembering this EP.
https://thecrawlingchaosrecords.bandcamp.com/album/folterplanet-2
https://www.facebook.com/teufelnacht/
NATTRADIO (Sweden)
Now I close, and now I throw the curveball, with a song and a cleverly unsettling video called “Sketches From the Dark“.
Although I don’t think anyone would consider this a variant of black metal, it’s still dark music, just as the title portends. The melancholy melody seems to miserably writhe as well as ring, with big groaning undercurrents and steady pulse-throbbing beats along for the ride. The clear, crooning vocal harmonies (reminiscent of Jonas Renske) are be-gloomed but especially captivating as they rise. Also along for the ride: brightly ringing piano keys, shimmering ambient mists, and other ingredients that make the music haunting, hallucinatory, and even a bit dangerous.
The band is Nattradio from Sweden. The song is from their second album The Longest Night, due for release on December 12th via Darkness Shall Rise. I’ll share this quote from one of Nattradio’s two members:
“NATTRADIO was born out of sleepless nights. Every song is written and recorded between 01:00 and 05:00. The songs move through a nocturnal landscape we call Doom Noir – drawing from ’90s gothic doom, darkwave, ambient, and, at times, noir jazz. The goal is to capture night-time themes. These are stories from the hours after midnight, with grief as the central emotion.”
https://save-it.cc/dsr/sketches-from-the-dark
https://nattradiodarknessshallrise.bandcamp.com/album/the-longest-night
https://www.facebook.com/Nattradio/