(Andy Synn kicks off his week with the new album from Dödsrit, out Friday)

There’s a certain type of person – trust me, I’ve encountered them a fair few times – who becomes inordinately angry if you try to talk about Dödsrit as being a “Black Metal” band.

But, of course, I highly doubt that Dödsrit themselves are all that fussed about the ongoing “he said, she said” of whether or not they’re “Black Metal enough” for the purists (surely that would be antithetical to the whole ethos of the genre anyway?) since they’ve been far too busy building an impressive career for themselves, on their own terms, to care about such petty concerns.

However – and here’s where things get interesting – the question of whether or not Dödsrit are still a Black Metal band, or how much of one they are, is actually very relevant when it comes to the release of their new album… though, perhaps, not quite in the way you might expect.

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(Sweden’s Dödsrit are back with their first album as a quartet – out this Friday via Wolves of Hades – and Andy Synn has the exclusive scoop right here)

The formula for mixing Black Metal and Crust Punk is so deceptively simple, but so undeniably effective, that it’s really no surprise that the past several years – the past decade, really – have seen such a major increase in bands looking to embrace this particular style and make it their own.

Of course, the crossover between the two styles isn’t a new phenomenon by any means, and stretches back even further than you might imagine, but the fact that it isn’t new doesn’t make it any less devastating in the right hands… and there’s practically no-one else whose hands I’d rather see it in than Dödsrit.

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