After a bit of a festival-induced hiatus in these Sunday columns, I’ve returned, and have had time to pull together a pretty good-sized selection of new blackened sounds today.
I’m leading off with three veteran bands who have managed to withstand the ravaging gales of time, and then I’ll move into newer collectives. I’m not sure there’s any organizing principle in what I chose, other than my own strong positive reactions to each choice. They include advance tracks from five forthcoming albums, some of them accompanied by videos, and one recently released full-length.
HORNED ALMIGHTY (Denmark)
The mighty Horned Almighty are returning to strike fear into the hearts of men, women, beasts, and probably plant life. Their new album, the seventh in a 20+ year career, is Contagion Zero. The first frights from it come in the form of a daunting and extremely dire song named “Ascension of Fever and Plague“.
Consistent with the song’s title, the scarred dissonant notes that slowly worm their way through the opening phase do sound like illness, like the dismal progression of a gangrenous pestilence. Ravaging howls and flesh-flaying screams rise up, while the rhythm section slugs the body below them.
But the song title portends fever too, and so the shrieking becomes more unhinged and the music also ignites, with drums blasting and the riffage swirling into a deleterious boil, still diseased and bleak in its mood but searing in its heated intensity.
The song continues to change as chords chime and the beats seem to lurch, but with a ghastly extended howl the music soars toward new heights of sheer blazing and electrifying madness before slowing and spreading plague again, accented by one last muscle-moving and head-bending series of progressions by the rhythm section and a final shattering vocal performance.
Contagion Zero was recorded, mixed, and mastered with producer Andreas Linnemann (Baest, Angerot, Suffer etc.) in Hop House Studios, and it features attention-seizing artwork by Belial Necroarts (Demonical, Gaerea, etc.). It will be released by Soulseller Records on July 5th.
https://soulsellerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/contagion-zero
https://soulsellerrecords.aisamerch.com/
https://www.facebook.com/hornedalmighty
https://www.instagram.com/hornedalmighty
SEAR BLISS (Hungary)
About a week ago Sear Bliss and Hammerheart Records released another song from this veteran Hungarian band’s next album, Heavenly Down. This one is “Chasm“, and it arrived with a video shot and edited by Mihaszna Film, which gives us good views of the band’s performance, interspersed with other interesting imagery.
This track, like others on the new album, is a wonderful amalgam of sensations which collectively create an epic experience. It’s a visceral head-mover but arcs heavenward in majestic sweeping tones. The vocals of András Nagy savagely claw at your throat and whirring riffage creates moods of sinister peril, but Zoltán Pál‘s trombone arrives in a gripping display of solemn grandeur, joined by Nagy‘s reverent singing.
The music ebbs, revealing simmering chords and big timpanic booms, climbs again, and then concludes with rippling electronic keyboards that sound mysterious and beckoning.
Hammerheart will release Heavenly Down on June 28th.
https://searbliss.lnk.to/heavenlydown
https://www.facebook.com/searblissband
https://www.instagram.com/searbliss
KRALLICE (U.S.)
On July 5th Krallice will release a new album named Inorganic Rites. It’s a milestone in several ways, not only their 15th album but a double-album, and the last one to be recorded at Colin Marston‘s Menegroth the Thousand Caves studio, as he has to move out of the space he’s had for the past 18 years this month.
Just yesterday Krallice made public the first advance track from the album, a 10-minute song called “Flatlines Encircled Residue“. So much happens in this head-spinning and jaw-dropping piece that it’s hard to know how to sum it up. Maybe it’s better to try to describe some of the moods and sounds you’ll pass through in this striking (and stricken) journey.
As they say in the trade, it’s a slow build — dark, foreboding, primitive, and mysterious at first, with extravagant hints of unearthly wonders to come; then increasingly sinister and frightful, with raw, tormented vocals materially adding to the spreading nightmare in the music; then the nightmare seems to bloom in full, engulfing the listener in sweeping synths, rattling drums, and musing bass tones.
The song somewhat subsides, becoming dreamlike again as the bass growls its thoughts; and then beastly sounds uneasily swirl, creating a prelude to a calamity made with rapidly tumbling drums, feverish and jolting fretwork, throat-ripping yells, and bone-chewing low frequencies.
The minutes pass without realizing it, and I’m left wondering what happens next, because the ending doesn’t really sound like an ending, but rather an artificial break in a trip that’s going to continue seamlessly into the next track. But we will see….
https://krallice.bandcamp.com/album/inorganic-rites
https://www.facebook.com/krallice
https://www.instagram.com/ygghuur/
HOULE (France)
There’s been lots of head-spinning music of different varieties in today’s collection so far, and so it seemed fitting to include another one next, from a Parisian band I seem to have slept on.
This song, “La Dance du Rocher“, is the newest single to be revealed from Houle‘s debut album Ciel Cendre et Misère Noire, which is a follow-up to their 2022 self-titled debut EP. It quickly pulls the listener into its grasp with a vivid thrashing riff, manically hurtling drums, and rabid vampiric screams — then suddenly slows and suddenly darts, with vocals that have transformed into a kind of high-pitched, near-whispering singing.
The music also whirls like a delirious dance, enticingly glitters like gold, races and feverishly flickers, snaps at your neck, ethereally chimes, and rumbles the guts. It relentlessly ebbs and flows, augmented by astutely fashioned changes by the rhythm section and a wide panoply of fretwork motifs, to go along with the extravagant vocal expressions.
Speaking of extravagance, by the end I thought of it as a spectacular piece of musical theater, no mere song but a carnival of delights.
Ciel Cendre et Misère Noire will be released on June 7th by Les Acteurs De L’Ombre. Not long now!
https://lesacteursdelombre.net/product-category/bands/houle/
https://houle.bandcamp.com/album/ciel-cendre-et-mis-re-noire
https://www.facebook.com/houleofficiel
KRÅBØL (Norway)
I was drawn to this next selection for two reasons: First, it’s an album that was just released by Terratur Possessions, and I do try to at least sample everything that label releases. Second, the band’s lineup consists of three generations within the same family — two brothers, their father, and the son of one of the brothers.
I should also mention that the grandfather Kråbøl plays the trumpet, and having already included black metal with brass up above, I was hoping I could do it again — and so I have!
I should listen to this album more than once before writing about it, but I’m afraid that if I take the time to do that I’ll miss my chance. So I’ll just give you a few high-level impressions as a hoped-for inducement for your own listening — and to prepare you for a very immersive and very dark experience.
On the one hand, Kråbøl prove themselves adept at discharging gales of black metal fire and ice, releasing galloping and furiously blasting drums, blistering harmonized riffing, and harrowing, scorch-the-earth screams. Even then, when storming, the riffing packs an emotional wallop, channeling feelings of frenzy and fear, confusion and despair, yearning and loss of hope.
On the other hand, when the flames and winds subside and the rhythm section stagger or bounce, Kråbøl use their shrill, vibrating riffage (and gasping growls) to drag the listener into sinkholes of frightening peril and agonized grief, sometimes sinking the listener even deeper by linking arms even more tightly with strains of depressive black metal (albeit with a few ancient folk elements in the mix, as I hear it).
On the third hand (we know we’re addressing mutants out there), Kråbøl also create nightmarish sonic hallucinations, deeply dismal and disturbing and far away from the mundane world, like leading us down a path to the underworld or parting the veil into a dimension inhabited by the shattered souls of the dead.
Usually, they do all these things within the same song, exploring different ways of sending chills across the skin and down the spine. I’m tempted to label this “atmospheric black metal”, though that’s probably misleading, because the creation of mood (hopeless moods) plays such a dominant role in the songcraft. That’s not to say the music won’t get your muscles moving, because it will, but it’s the distressing emotional power of the riffing and the shattering intensity of the vocals that stands out front.
The name of the album is Never. It was released by Terratur Possessions on May 31st.
P.S. The afore-mentioned lineup includes people who have participated in such groups as Tulus, Sarke, Minas Tirith, Khold, Misotheist, Enevelde, and Katechon.
https://terraturpossessions.bandcamp.com/album/never
HEILUNG (International)
And now to close for today.
I will say that Heilung put on one of the five best live performances of metal or “metal adjacent” music I’ve ever seen and heard, and I don’t know what the other four would be. I spilled a lot of words here about that September 2022 concert in Seattle, including these about what happened during Heilung‘s performance of the song “Traust“:
At one point Faust took the center of the stage, and there he bound a woman, her arms bent back and a spear thrust through the angles they made behind her back. He then forced her to her knees in the midst of the music. It was a jarring moment in a night that in my imagination had an overarching message of equality.
But Maria Franz appeared in the spotlight and moved Faust into the shadows. As she sang she lifted the woman up, withdrew the spear, and unbound the victim. The captive stood tall, flung her head back, and raised her arms high above. The crowd went wild too. I was too overwhelmed to take a photo.
A few days ago Heilung released a beautifully filmed video of this same scene during their live performance at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater in October 2021. Watching it sent chills down my spine again. You can watch it below.
A recording of that same Red Rocks performance will be released on August 9th of this year by Season of Mist under the title LIFA Iotungard.
https://heilung.bandcamp.com/album/lifa-iotungard
https://www.facebook.com/amplifiedhistory