We are very happy today to revisit the daunting visionary music of the Australian black metal band Krvna, although the band’s creations have been anything but happy, and indeed so emotionally harrowing and so wholly engulfing in their power that they take the breath away.
The occasion for our revisiting of Krvna today is the planned January 10 release by a trio of labels of the project’s new half-hour EP The Rythmus of Death Eternal. It includes three extravagant new original songs, plus covers of songs by Abigor and Viking-era Bathory, and we have the premiere of one of the monumental new songs today — “What Great Lengths“.
For those who may be encountering this band for the first time, it’s the solo work of Krvna Vatra Smrt. His previous Krvna releases have explored the global vampire mythos, inspired by the folk stories and legends passed down through his mother’s family (of Istro-Romanian descent) over countless generations, but have also expanded in their conceptual themes as time has passed (we’ve written a lot about all this here.)
The song you’re about to hear, “What Great Lengths“, displays many of the qualities that have made Krvna‘s music so striking before.
The elaborately layered guitars create sensations that are dismal and distressing. They roil in the low end and flicker like white fire above. Coupled with tortured screams, blistering drums, and manic bass tones, those frantic screaming strings create an electrifying experience of unhinged turmoil. But the music also swells and expands, moving in dramatic, towering waves of impending catastrophe. A guitar solo seems to wail in agony. The vocals become even more terrifyingly intense.
With a needling guitar-pulse leading the way, the intensity shifts as the song transforms into a staggering, stricken march, but it again grows increasingly vast in its expanse and ruinous in its channeling of hopelessness and pain.
As the labels’ publicist right recounts, the music is majestic and mystical, rumbling and rippling, “surging, skyscraping, even sensual”.
We also urge you to listen to “A God’s Work“, another song from the EP that premiered about a month ago. Soft, subdued, and sorrowful at the start, it magnifies in volume and heaviness, and in its moods of distress and despair.
It too rises like an imposing obsidian monument, with the rhythm section causing the earth around it to heave and fracture, and the nimble lead-guitar maneuvers creating feverish swirls of gleaming sound that eventually spiral into a wailing solo that seamlessly explodes into a fretwork extravaganza. The vocals are again completely terrifying in their soul-bursting extremity.
In this song Krvna save the moments of greatest intensity and bleak grandeur to the final minutes, anxious to take away what breaths you may have left.
As mentioned at the outset, The Rythmus of Death Eternal will be released by three labels on January 10th, in a variety of formats. Zazen Sounds will offer it on digipak CD; Third Eye Temple will handle the cassette-tape release; and vinyl will be forthcoming from Brilliant Emperor. For more info, check the links below.
The cover songs are Abigor‘s “As Astral Images Darken Reality” and Bathory‘s “Man of Iron“. Both are fantastic, just like the third original song (“Endless Monument“).
ZAZEN SOUNDS:
https://www.zazensounds.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ZazenSounds
https://www.instagram.com/officialzazensounds/
THIRD EYE TEMPLE:
https://www.thirdeyetemple.com/
https://www.facebook.com/thirdeyetemple
https://www.instagram.com/third_eye_temple/
BRILLIANT EMPEROR:
https://brilliantemperor.bigcartel.com/
https://www.facebook.com/BrilliantEmperorRecords/
https://www.instagram.com/brilliantemperor/
KRVNA:
https://krvna.bandcamp.com/album/the-rhythmus-of-death-eternal
https://www.facebook.com/krvnaofficial
https://www.instagram.com/krvna_offcial/