HORIZON ABLAZE – LIVETS HØST

(Andy Synn catches up with a long-time NCS favourite and their long-awaited new album, out now)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but eight years is a pretty long time to go between albums.

Hell, in the last eight years I’ve attended multiple weddings (including my own), been to more funerals than I’d like, gained new friends, lost some others, and travelled to more countries than I can currently name off the top of my head.

What I’m saying is that a lot can change in eight years, so the Horizon Ablaze of 2026 is, inevitably, not the same band they were in 2018… both in terms of their overall line-up (with previous bassist Ole Madsen now replaced by former live-guitarist Jan Laksesvela) and in relation to how they’ve all changed and grown as people during the near-decade long gap between releases.

But, you know what they say… the more things change, the more they stay the same.

What I mean by this is that, in spite of all the time that’s passed between them, there’s still a clear connective thread between The Weight of a Thousand Suns (still one of the most brilliant albums of 2018) and Livets Høst, which shares a similarly contemplative-yet-cathartic vibe with its prodigious precursor.

But whereas The Weight… inspired comparisons to the likes of latter-day Emperor and early Ihsahn with its rivetingly tight riffage and bleak, brooding overtones, Livets Høst feels more closely aligned with the proggier works of Enslaved, Code (circa-Augur Nox) and Keep of Kalessin in the way it manages to be both moodier and more introspective, yet also more epic and bombastic.

That’s not to say it doesn’t still possess the ability to set the northern sky ablaze – both fiery first track “Flammehav” and early second-half highlight “Byrde” possess all the same power and presence of similar stand-outs like “Sleep is the Brother of Death” and “She Who Walks Upon the Sea” from their last album – but the overall vibe certainly skews a little bit more melodic and melancholic.

Which, to be clear, is no bad thing, especially in regards to both the impressively intricate (and, where necessary, imposingly intense) guitar work and captivating interplay between harsh and clean vocals (with the sublime singing voice of Maurice Adams soaring to even greater heights during the likes of “Dødssøvn” and “Hjerterot”, the latter of which finds the band pushing the proggier side of their sound even further, to excellent results) which drives so much of the music this time around.

Speaking of driving the music, special mention must go to the absolutely stunning performance of drummer Kevin Kvaele, who not only delivers some of the most punishing passages of blazing blastbeats this side of a 1349 record on tracks like “Tid” and epic closer “Evigheten” (which makes it no surprise that he’s filled in live for Frost before), but also showcases some scintillatingly dynamic and creative percussive patterns across the board (his work in the second half of “Dødssøvn” and the shapeshifting “Forlatt” being of particular note).

Would I say that Livets Høst is a better album than The Weight of a Thousand Suns? Well, I think that would be going a step too far, as that album remains a very special (and horrendously underrated) record in my opinion, without whom this one wouldn’t even exist.

But it is, no doubt, a natural extension of – and a more than worthy successor to – its outstanding predecessor, one which refuses to simply be a carbon-copy of the band’s previous work(s) and continues to strike out on its own path, refusing to be confined or constrained by the imposed expectations and limitations of style or genre.