(written by Islander)
Life events external to NCS have forced me to again truncate my plans for this usual Sunday column devoted to variants of black metal. All is well, but I need to leave home and computer fairly soon, too soon for me to do more than write about one album that came out just two days ago, but that I’ve been enjoying for about two weeks. In the coming week I may be able to write recommendations for the other releases I had planned to include today before said life events interfered.
GLORIOR BELLI (France)
We have been avidly following and writing about the changing exploits of Glorior Belli for the last 15 years, beginning with The Great Southern Darkness in 2011. Of course those exploits began much earlier: Three albums preceded that one, including 2009’s Meet Us at the Southern Sign, a record on which Glorior Belli controversially began diverging from their more conventionally furious black metal roots and indulging experiments in hybridization — hybrids of Luciferian black metal, NOLA sludge, and swampy Southern rock that fully bloomed on The Great Southern Darkness.
From 2013 through 2025 Glorior Belli released four more albums following that big eye-opener in 2011, the most recent of which was a self-titled album in 2025. But it really wasn’t “self-titled”, not really named for the band, but instead invoking the meaning of the band’s Latin name in honoring and supporting the armed forces of Ukraine, to whom the album was dedicated. Many people perceived it as a swing back toward Glorior Belli’s diabolically fierce and rebelliously insurgent black metal roots (though swings in different directions had been happening before then).
That self-titled album followed its predecessor The Apostates by seven years, and so it was a surprise to see that Glorior Belli would be returning with another album this year, representing the shortest interval between full-lengths in the band’s history. It was released just two days ago, exactly four weeks away from both The Great NOLA Trendkill festival in New Orleans, headlined by Pantera and Down, and Nuclear Blast’s release of a new Down album (Volume V). The timing wasn’t coincidental, because the new album re-claims Glorior Belli’s NOLA-sludge lineage.
The name of the new album is Ave Marais — a heretical play on words, a replacing of Maria in the Latin prayer (the “Hail Mary”) with the French word for marsh or swamp. The title is in accord with the cover art and aligns with Glorior Belli’s statement about the album’s themes (excerpted below from the record’s Bandcamp page):
The thematic world of Ave Marais fuses Luciferian anti-cosmic rebellion with the imagery of the southern swamp: drowned churches, cracked icons, crawfish and herons, mildewed rosaries, poisoned scripture. The liturgical is everywhere — and everywhere corrupted. The Ave Maria rewrites itself in bayou mud. The saint’s hand disappears into the reeds.
The album is 12 songs long. Mastermind Billy Bayou’s old ally Dwid Hellion of Integrity fame makes guest vocal appearances on two songs in the album’s back half, and the record closes with a cover of EyeHateGod’s “Jack Ass in the Will of God“, which appeared on Confederacy of Ruined Lives (2000).
As you will expect by now, the music is in most important respects an homage to NOLA sludge and Delta blues, with comparatively smaller accents of hell-riding black metal that Glorior Belli has fused almost seamlessly into the main musical mission, and with lyrics that would make Lucifer proud.
Glorior Belli has described the title song “Ave Marais“, for which a lyric video was released, as “pure Luciferian bayou blasphemy: swamp-drenched blues riffs, slide guitars caked in mud, sludge grooves that drag you under, and black metal venom straight from the marais.”
You can taste the sludge in the music’s tar-thick bottom-heavy low end and the bluesy wail-and-moan of the melody, which quickly generates moods that are both gloomy and sinister. The slow-paced drums fire like gunshots, and Billy Bayou ejects the blasphemous words in wrenching screams of fury and ugly, strangled snarls.
As the song proceeds, it intensifies, with drums more brutally slugging and the riffing generating a poisonous surging pulse, but the music also wails in more painful swaths of misery, which reach their pinnacle in a guitar solo steeped in the blues.
You won’t hear much overt black-metal influence in that song, perhaps apart from the bitterness of the ear-shredding vocals, and there’s not much of it in the album’s opening song “Gatordéon” either, but that song is less swampy, less bluesy, and more groovesome, more energized and compulsively muscle-moving, and an even more full-frontal statement of the album’s NOLA-sludge homage than the very bluesy title song.
In “Gatordéon“, the lead guitar generates long caustic whines that eventually soar, and the vocals bear down on the ugly, serrated-edge growls and beastly snarls. It too intensifies as it moves, with drums pumping like pistons, the bass thundering bone-deep, and the riffing creating a spread of searing fire.
From there, “Sermo de la Soeur Voaz” moves like a big hulking beast with murder on its mind and narcotics in its veins; the lead guitar again burns, but gets bluesy again too, and even sounds like a saxophone screaming at the end.
On the other side of “Ave Marais” (the song), “Hostile O’vide!” stays in the swamp, trudging through the muck and sending blues-guitar wails up toward the moon; the devil sits at the crossroads in the track’s simple and slowly ringing guitar instrumental.
Beyond that the songs are sometimes faster, sometimes slower (though the tempos are in flux within almost every song), but rarely reach racing speed. Glorior Belli continues to anchor them with lead-weighted bass lines and shotgun-strength drum rhythms, which often reach rocking gear and even start blasting here and there, and the songs continue unfurling shrill and soaring lead-guitars. Vocally, those ugly growls continue to predominate, but with a few well-placed variations.
Melodically, “Barda & Bayouteries” gets spooky; “Sainte-Syd l’Eve-en-Jean” includes some extravagant singing in the midst of heaving moves, as well as battering-ram grooves, the most furious blast-beats so far, and a crescendo of raw trim-picked fury; while “Beelzelboue” opens with a beastly bass solo, includes near-sung baritone vox, and both charges hard and gets very trippy.
The swamp will suck you down in “Misery Cordy“, but the song will also give you haunting guitar melodies and a bracing gallop that accelerates into a blast-fest.
The first of Dwid Hellion’s appearances occurs on “What Do I Owe“, a 37-second piece of vaporous spookiness in which harsh vocals can be dimly heard. He’s more prominently involved in “Jèze-Belle à Crocquer“, adding raw and ragged howls, possessed cries, and scary whispers to a song that’s both an up-tempo but very bluesy romp, a ghostly musical mist, and a full-bore blast-beat attack that’s nevertheless swampy to the point of choking. Its slow final instrumental phase is also spellbinding.
I need to wrap up this very wordy commentary, and so will only say this about the two closing songs: The ambling and quirky “Cul-de-Jacques Béni” (which also includes briefly sung vocals) really invokes the atmosphere of New Orleans but administers musical doses of psychoactive substances too, and the EyeHateGod cover makes for a perfect finish to an album that’s concocted like this one was; it’s gnarly, nasty, and gnashing but also slowly slithers like an engorged python and gleams like moonbeams.
I have no idea how Glorior Belli’s fans will react to Ave Marais. I guess it will depend on which sides of the musical lines they sit, the lines that Glorior Belli has caused to intersect in various ways before this. I would guess that lovers of sludge and the blues will enjoy sitting with this album repeatedly, while devotees of black metal may be dismayed, because this one’s fusion of all those influences leans much harder into the former than the latter.
I, for one, found it fascinating and thoroughly engaging from start to finish, and — full disclosure — I think I would even if I didn’t have at least three generations of Cajun Louisiana ancestry behind me.
https://gloriorbelli.bandcamp.com/album/ave-marais
https://linktr.ee/gloriorbelli
https://www.instagram.com/gloriorbelliofficial
https://www.facebook.com/gloriorbelliofficial/