Black Metal

Satanic Metal Temple 2018-2020 Anno Satanas.

All music by Werwolf. Lyrics by Vritrahn and Werwolf, except “Crucifucked (S.S.)” by Shyaithan (Impiety).

Black Metal

After a split with Warmoon Lord, here the debut album of Vultyrium.

Medieval, barbaric and vicious Metal for all warriors of darkness.

Black Metal

WARMOON LORD is arguably the best-kept secret of the ever-fertile Finnish black metal underground. The band is the sole work of one Lord Vrajitor, a prolific figure in the wider Finnish music underground, but also concurrently the mainman of OLD SORCERY. But whereas that band largely/mostly works within the dungeon synth genre, WARMOON LORD is pure & proud black metal of a most fantastical nature – equally medieval, maybe even more so, but burning with icy-hot passion that so fired the second wave during the mythical 1990s.

Black Metal

Once the best-kept secret of the ever-fertile Finnish black metal underground, WARMOON LORD truly made their presence known with 2021’s Battlespells. Released by WEREWOLF, the band’s second album fulfilled the promise of 2019’s not-inconsiderable Burning Banners of the Funereal War with superlative flair. The sound was stridently classicist, but suffused with windswept grandeur, martial surge, and orkish execution – and, perhaps above all, both songwriting and personality to spare. No longer “the other project of the OLD SORCERY guy,” WARMOON LORD mainman Lord Vrajitor made sure Battlespells lived up to its namesake, and then some.

Black Metal

For a decade now, Finland’s WHITE DEATH have built a small-yet-formidable canon of work that’s come to define modern underground black metal in their nation. It’s no secret that Finland has possessed one of the most potent black metal scenes from the early ’90s onward, and with each new generation that picks up the torch, some are contenders and others are just content to uphold “the Finnish sound.” WHITE DEATH took their time with deploying demos and then their debut album, simply self-titled, but they occupied a unique position between those poles: steeped in noble tradition, but exuding a confidence and charisma that rendered White Death an exceptionally nasty work even with its considerably cleaner production. Three years of silence followed between the release of that debut album and the three-song Promo 2020, which included an Enochian Crescent cover – an inspired choice from an oft-unsung legend, and a portent of grandeur to come.

Black Metal

One of the most notorious names in the still-thriving Finnish black metal scene, GOATMOON has been an uber-prolific force of iron will since the band’s creation in 2002, all guided by the monomaniacal hand of BlackGoat Gravedesecrator. The band’s earliest efforts were extremely raw and punk-oriented, but it was with 2007’s Finnish Steel Stormwhere GOATMOON truly came into its own, exhibiting a sense of refinement rarely heard in such hateful-yet-epic black metal whilst retaining its core identity, and a title by which BlackGoat Gravedesecrator has fulfilled on all successive recordings. Of them, the subsequent third and fourth albums – 2011’s Varjotand 2014’s Voitto tai Valhalla, respectively – saw GOATMOON continue that refinement with equally compelling results, and in the process garner a more fanatic fanbase…and further infamy.

Black Metal

The bats having flown the belfry, YMIR continue their pillage of the present with the second album Aeons of Sorrow. Driving deeper into the past, Vrasjarn unfurls a comparatively more melodic and nuanced record that’s icier and, daresay, more beautiful. Here, he’s joined by the always-commanding presence of Corvus on vocals and prolific veteran drummer VnoM, with bass by True Black Dawn’s Syphon and additional synths by Tyranny’s Agathul – a crucial component of the mesmerizing tapestry of Aeons of Sorrow. To step into the album’s landscape is to imbue the spiritual essence, the psychic sensations, the all-enveloping ATMOSPHERE of 1995. Quiet castles, ice-capped mountains, beastly blizzards, infinite darkness, capes and swords and chainmail: while seemingly innocuous “triggers” for those who don’t breathe that essence – or worse, mere items of mockery – they serve as the textural touchstones for bands like YMIR and records like Aeons of Sorrow, both in increasingly short supply no matter what the internet might tell you. And yet, with the skillfully unselfconscious songwriting on display here, the album adds to that noble tradition rather than listlessly pecking at its remains.