AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: LAVA INVOCATOR — “WELCOME TO HELL”

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Jun 132025
 

(written by Islander)

When the Ukrainian black metal band Lava Invocator released their debut album Mörk in March 2017 Russia had already illegally “annexed” Crimea, and pro-Russian “separatists” had declared “independence” in the eastern region of Donbas, leading to persistent fighting that had killed thousands. But at that time Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was still five years away. Now, of course it is a brutal reality.

It was in the midst of that brutal reality that Lava Invocator wrote and recorded their second album, released in April 2023, and gave it a name inspired by what was happening around them and in the world at large: Signs Of Apocalypse.

The war grinds on. There have been significant combat casualties on the Ukrainian side, and the thug in charge of Russia also continues to rain death in routine terror attacks on Ukrainian civilians. But according to this report yesterday in The Washington Post, since January 2024 Russian forces have seized less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory and “Russian fatalities in Ukraine now exceed the total number of Soviet and Russian soldiers killed in every war since World War II combined.” The report estimates that by this summer Russia will likely pass 1 million total military casualties.

It is in this context that today we premiere a lyric video for a song off Lava Invocator‘s last album, their greeting to invaders called “Welcome to Hell“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LAVA INVOCATOR — “PSYCHO-TERROR WORLDWIDE”

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Apr 172023
 

When the Ukrainian black metal band Lava Invocator released their debut album Mörk in March 2017 Russia had already illegally “annexed” Crimea, and pro-Russian “separatists” had declared “independence” in the eastern region of Donbas, leading to persistent fighting that had killed thousands. But at that time Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was still five years away. Now, of course it is a brutal reality.

And it was in the midst of that brutal reality that Lava Invocator wrote and recorded their second album, and gave it a name inspired by what was happening around them and in the world at large: Signs Of Apocalypse.

You can imagine the harrowing destruction of modern warfare when listening to the album’s music, and you’d expect nothing less from a band named Lava Invocator. But their music is far more multi-faceted than that. There’s a fascinating dynamism in the songwriting, a compelling use of melody, and the generation of mood-changing atmosphere, not to mention a lot of attention-seizing instrumental inventiveness.

We have an excellent demonstration of all this in “Psycho-Terror Worldwide“, the song we’re premiering today in advance of the album’s April 20 co-release by Satanath Records (Georgia) and The Ritual Productions (Netherlands). Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LAVA INVOCATOR — “BLACK DAWN”

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Mar 052017
 

 

Mörk is the debut album of the Ukrainian black metal duo Lava Invocator. It will be co-released on March 27 by the Russian labels Satanath Records and More Hate Productions. Two songs from the album have premiered previously, and today we bring you a third — a track called “Black Dawn“.

“Mörk” is the Swedish word for “dark” and shares its origins with the English word “murk”. We’re told that Lava Invocator was conceived in the old Swedish town of Lund near Malmö, under the shadow of dark storm clouds passing above the Øresund strait. And “Black Dawn” is itself cloaked in gloom. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: FIN, LAVA INVOCATOR, FJOERGYN, TERROR THRONE

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Feb 212017
 

 

Sundays are the days usually reserved for SHADES OF BLACK posts, but by coincidence most of the new songs I discovered yesterday that I thought I’d include in a round-up were in a black vein. So I’ve collected those here, and I’ll defer the others to a SEEN AND HEARD post tomorrow.

I really like the music of all four of these bands and hope you will, too. The first three items below are advance tracks from forthcoming releases and the last one is a new demo the band wrote us about.

FIN

I’ve been following this Chicago band since May of 2013, when I scribbled some enthusiastic thoughts about their 2012 demo, Fated By Will and Iron. In February 2015 I loosed another flood of enthusiastic verbiage about their third album The Furrows of Tradition (along with a track premiere). And then last year I gushed about one of FIN’s songs for a split with the Austrian band Totale Vernichtung — which still hasn’t been released yet. Continue reading »