Reviewing albums explicitly labelled post-metal always seems to bring out my inner pedant. I know all genre labels are kind of meaningless, but post-metal specifically seems to simply be slapped onto anything with fewer riffs than your average atmo-black record, but a lot more cleans. Nonetheless, you know what it sounds like, in essence. If that essence had form, it could be Unverkalt on their third LP Héréditaire. Born in Greece and now split between Greece and Germany, Unverkalt’s self-styled avant-garde approach to post-metal takes its “heaviest and most heartfelt” form on this album, which also marks their signing with Season of Mist. Unknown to me beforehand, promotional references to Cut of Luna and Sylvaine in particular caught my eye, along with the art. I’m glad I picked it up because Unverkalt have something that approaches brilliance at many times. But in embodying the vague yet recognisable subgenre—and sounding good whilst doing it—Héréditaire fails to go further than the safety of the minimum required.

Ignore the artist touchstones in the promo; Unverkalt has little meaningful in common with them: a female lead vocalist is about where that starts and ends. If anything, the aura reflects more Harakiri for the Sky, Heretoir, or maybe Frayle. Lead vocalist Dimitra Kalavrezou sings with a distinctive, somewhat sweet intonation, and screams with articulate fierceness—impressive considering this is her first record providing harsh vocals. Her voice is joined by that of guitarist Eli Mavrychev and—in a late-album highlight—Sakis Tolis (“I, The Deceit”), often layered and intermingled to lend a chorus-of-many-voices air that can be quite powerful. This sense of solidarity and humanity ties into Héréditaire’s overt emotionality—easily its greatest asset—which revolves around mournful yet uplifting themes that rise from softly resonant notes into the (regrettably blurry) weeping of tremolo and chunky riffs. It’s through the continued swell and fade of each composition that we get to see the greats that Unverkalt is capable of.

Héréditaire by Unverkalt

Even as songs tend to repeat the same pattern, most manage to draw the listener in. Synths (“Oath ov Prometheus”), vaguely MENA-style saxophone (“Ænæ Lithi”), and sprinklings of piano (“Penumbrian Lament”), and humming strings (“Maladie de l’Esprit”)1 float in and out, and I only wish they were used more. Harnessing the drama of surging, urgent riffs (“Die Auslöschung,” “Oath ov Prometheus”) and heartfelt group screams and singing (“Death is Forever,” “A Lullaby for the Descent”), the iterated compositions win you over by sheer force. These plainly beautiful melodies and ardent vocal performances are inextricable, each lending the other a level of strength and gravity neither could claim in isolation. Some songs stand head and shoulders above others in this regard: “Die Auslöschung,” “Death is Forever,” “Maladie de l’Esprit,” and in particular, “I, the Deceit,” where Sakis Tolis brings not only his voice but a distinctly Scandinavian melodeath2 vibe to a song where he and Dimitria also duet in their shared native tongue. That song and many others are also examples of Unverkalt’s strange, quasi-pop-rock leanings that they incorporate through the use of bobbing, understated clean refrains that slingshot back into something heavier or more atmospheric (“Oath ov Prometheus,” “A Lullaby for the Descent,” “Introjects”). This weirdness sharpens Unverkalt’s style and works surprisingly well.

Héréditaire thus brims with feeling, strong melodies, and potential. Undeniably stirring at its best (“Die Auslöschung,” “I, the Deceit,” “Maladie de l’Esprit”), and with little idiosyncrasies of style giving it distinction, as a whole it feels oddly unrealised. One culprit is the shockingly compressed mix, which robs the guitars of their body and drums of their bite. Given the vocal range on display and the elements of instrumental experimentation (horns, piano, etc), this would sound far better with a roomier production. But it’s primarily the overly repetitive structure of the compositions that causes issues. Though the passion of the singing or screaming, and the force of a good melody cause you to briefly forget, every song follows essentially the same trajectory—or rather, the same sequence of things repeats across the album, sometimes spanning between songs. Whispers or quiet singing, a steady beat and post-rock atmosphere, black-adjacent speed and screaming, and a lapse into a swaying tempo. With nine tracks adding up to around 50 minutes, you start to notice.

I don’t want to rag on Héréditarire too much; it’s a good album. The fervency and melancholia of the vocal performances—from Dimitria especially—and melodies show the passion behind the project, and there’s a thread of individuality that could pull them out of obscurity. But for as expressive, intriguing, and compelling as their music often is, Unverkalt’s reluctance—or inability—to step outside of a template holds them down when they could be soaring.

Rating: Good
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Season of Mist
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: February 27th, 2026

Drudkh – Forgotten Legends (Vinyl)

The album consists of four songs and every song has its own idea and purpose. There are epic "False Dawn", depressive "Forests in Fire and Gold" and cold "Eternal Turn Of The Wheel". Every of them contain sharp vocals, monotonous but not less beautiful and melodic tunes and clear drums without blastbeats. "Forgotten Legends" is the great album with catchy melodies and a pure rawness.

#blackmetal #vinyl #seasonofmist

Recensie: Green Carnation – A Dark Poem, Pt I: The Shores Of Melancholia ★★★★
https://writteninmusic.com/albumrecensie/green-carnation-a-dark-poem-pt-i-the-shores-of-melancholia/

#Music #Metal #GreenCarnation #SeasonofMist #Bertus

Der Weg Einer Freiheit – Innern [Things You Might Have Missed 2025]

By Thus Spoke

My experience with Der Weg Einer Freiheit differs quite substantially from our resident Eldritch reviewer. Perhaps because my first taste was 2017’s Finisterre, I never saw it, nor later Noktvrn (2021) as disappointing steps down from previous Stellar heights. In my eyes, the path that Der Weg Einer Freiheit followed in the last decade is not only a natural extension of their introspective, emotionally-charged black metal, but it has also enabled them to expand and enhance this consistently potent core to new levels. Whilst sliding into post-metal, and opening themselves to the admittedly unrefined use of gaze, the group nonetheless fold them into the speed and fury of their heavier side, ramping up the climaxes, and making Noktvrn a staggeringly impactful work whose official score here I can only respectfully disagree with. It was largely due to my love for that record that I was so excited at the approach of Innern earlier this year.1 Little did I know that it would fall to me, come list season, to give Der Weg Einer Freiheit their due.

Innern takes the fragments of Der Weg Einer Freiheit’s personality and combines them in a way that demonstrates their evolution across the board. Their flair for continual escalation, with a darkly humming atmosphere, urgent guitar lines, and a cascading torrent of percussion, has only improved. It gives first track, “Marter,” a strange yet inexorable ability to make me feel excited for an album I’m already listening to, and this tug deep in my core will resurface repeatedly as “Xilbaba,” “Eos,” and “Fragment” rush upwards toward, or collapse downwards into their own devastating climaxes. The group’s recent experimentation with softer textures is manifest in yet more layers that make the intense sound more intense (“Marter,” “Eos”) and the introspective more introspective (“Fragment,” “Forlorn”), pulling its listener in deep either way. Innern does mean ‘inside’, after all.

The music has—somehow—more presence than ever. Guitars sound downright cinematic in their grandiose, sweeping paths or resonant chimes, but whether surging or sighing, you listen. It doesn’t hurt that they carry some of the most gorgeous melodies of Der Weg Einer Freiheit’s career (“Xilbaba,” “Eos”). The final act, signified by the return of piano in late instrumental “Finisterre III” and the closing, English-sung “Forlorn,” does not weaken Innern’s resolve nor its magnetism. With decisive chords and dreamily sad scales as carefully placed for reflection as those that began the album in “Marter” were for anticipation. And the shoegaze is no longer shoehorned and segregated; unlike Noktvrn’s maligned “Haven,” “Forlorn” has bite, and it rises as it should out of the conflicting emotions of apathy and longing that final track expresses. Once again, Tobias Schuler’s drumming propels violent, beautiful storms from calm to fury and back with a graceful savagery that could send death metal percussionists packing. Innern’s use of tempos to construct an ebb and flow that rushes and crashes around the listener, and allows space for a forlorn tremolo to ring in the air, and Nikita Kamprad’s scream to hold, is little short of magnificent.

So monumental in aura is Innern, and yet, so easy to listen to. Not even 45 minutes long, and dripping with feeling, suffused with captivating melodies and compelling rhythms, the silence at its close comes with a jolt as the portal suddenly closes. Needless to say, I’ve been hitting it on repeat for a while now. The sterner side of me would acknowledge the album’s quiet(er) death—from “Finisterre III” onwards—may irk some, but as I indicated earlier, not only does the seamless and natural exhale of “Finisterre III”-“Forlorn” flow perfectly, there’s a decisiveness and a finality to this closing act that I’ve come to appreciate more and more.

If somehow you’re reading this and either a) like Der Weg Einer Freiheit but haven’t got to Innern yet; or b) have never listened to them before, but like the sound of anything above. Stop what you’re doing immediately, please, and give Innern a spin. This might be the best Der Weg Einer Freiheit ever sounded.

Tracks to Check Out: “Marter,” “Xilbaba,” “Eos,” “Forlorn”

#2025 #atmosphericBlackMetal #blackMetal #derWegEinerFreiheit #germanMetal #innern #postMetal #seasonOfMist #thingsYouMightHaveMissed2025

ENTHRONED – Ashspawn
https://eternal-terror.com/?p=73811

RELEASE YEAR: 2025BAND URL: https://orcd.co/enthronedashspawn

The Belgian black metal trailblazers known as Enthroned have been rather prolific since the band’s inception back in 1993, and the remarkable thing about this most unholy and impenetrably dark outfit is that they are getting better and better with time. With that in mind, let us take a closer look at their upcoming musical […]

#ashspawn #blackMetal #enthroned #orthodoxBlackMetal #seasonOfMist

📰 New #Alkaloid news item

✍️ By me
🎶 #whiteroomreviews
💿 #SeasonofMist

🔗 https://www.whiteroomreviews.nl/nieuws/alkaloid-brengt-klassiek-en-extreme-metal-samen-op-nieuwe-liveplaat-bach-out-of-bounds

Danheim – Heimferd Review

By Mystikus Hugebeard

Ah, the Viking Age. One of the most mythologized eras in history, and a bottomless well of inspiration for cool things like video games, shows, books, tattoos, and bad things like obsession over ancestral purity, shockingly racist ideologies, and lutefisk. But the best thing of all, and most importantly, music! Which leads us to Danheim (Literally “Danish Home”). Danheim is the solo Nordic folk project by Reidar Schæfer Olsen, and Heimferd is his first full album in four years, which might as well be an eternity. Danheim is usually very prolific, with eight albums released between 2017 and 2021, with about a gazillion singles released during and after those 4 years. Furthermore, Danheim is one of the more well-known Nordic folk artists; he has numerous collaborations with, to name a few, Gealdýr, Sigurboði, Heldom, and has, like Wardruna, been featured on the History Channel’s Vikings. In other words, Danheim is something of a titan of the genre—is Heimferd worth the wait?

Danheim’s music, and by extension Heimferd, is a sonic extension of the version of the Vikings that has embedded itself within people’s imagination and contemporary media: an intoxicating image of a powerful and mysterious people, plunged into a captivating world of violence and mysticism.1 Most might immediately connect Danheim’s sound to Wardruna (not unjustifiably), but that paints a rather flat picture. The music is cinematic in a way that calls to mind a less avant-garde Heilung, it vibrates with a slightly electronic, tribal weight that, at this point, belongs more to Danheim than any of his peers (but one might still compare it to Vígundr or Heldom), and it’s atmospheric and densely layered like, well, Wardruna. But I believe it’s the simple immediacy of Danheim’s that has made him the Nordic folk titan that he is. It’s just so easy to fall under the spell of electronically augmented droning chants set to the rhythm of deep, beating drums, heard in some form or another in nearly every song on Heimferd.

…and yet, there sadly wafts an air of shallowness across Heimferd. There is an unfulfilled relationship between Heimferd’s sound and its songwriting. Heimferd’s stellar production and the variety of instruments create a captivating soundscape, but so rarely do songs breathe or evolve in a way that gives the songs life. This is felt all throughout Heimferd. “Heljar Skuggar” and “Rúnmyrkr” each utilize engaging, distorted chants in the vein of Heilung, but feel stagnant, without peaks or valleys. Songs are often lacking in stakes or tension, the worst of which is heard in the lifeless “Valvejen” as it flits loosely between tagelharpa melodies and excessive downtime. For songs meant to sound almost hypnotic in their droning, much comes off as forgettable, like “Kominn Dagr” as it switches from monotone chanting into a toothless tagelharpa melody, neither section given ample time to grow or make an impact. Clearly, Danheim places a lot of emphasis on atmosphere, and Heimferd is indeed viking-y at a distance—but up close, there is little to sink your teeth into.

This is not always the case, however, with a handful of songs towering above the rest. The vocal-heavy closer, “Yggdrasil II” (a sequel to “Yggdrasil” from 2018’s Fridr), has a quiet majesty to its rhythmic and beautiful chorus. “Vindfari” is an unassuming song that really sneaks up on you, as the drums march behind a simple chanting melody with a peculiar, percussive vocal delivery to some words that adds unique character to the song. Heimferd’s best song is “Haukadalur,” though. This song moves and breathes like a living thing, as distant haggard exhalations augment a powerful beat which heralds a coarse, dancing tagelharpa. These songs have such richness to their melodies, making the most of Danheim’s accessible and engaging style. It feels as if this has been my experience with every Danheim album: two or three genuinely stellar tracks that speak of an artist capable of amazing things, surrounded by songs that sound great but leave little impression.

Danheim has ever been frustrating for me, and Heimferd reaffirms that feeling. His infectious soundscape sufficiently conjures a Viking-age atmosphere and energy, but with base songwriting that so rarely transforms the music into something lasting or impactful. It’s strange, because my first listen of Heimferd was the most positive one, and I think it’s because Danheim’s style of Nordic folk can be cathartic in a way not many other artists within the genre are. But on each subsequent spin, when I listen closer, probing, pleading for depth, I’m left wanting. Heimferd is the distilled essence of the modern perception of Vikings, but with little drama or tension. It’s fun, but ephemeral.

Rating: Mixed
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps
Label: Season of Mist
Websites: official | bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: October 31st, 2025

#25 #2025 #Danheim #DarkFolk #Gealdýr #Heilung #Heimferd #Heldom #Neofolk #NordicFolk #Oct25 #Review #Reviews #SeasonOfMist #Sigurbodi #Vigundr #VikingMusic #Wardruna

Tonight's 📷🎥 office will be #thornhill + #oceangrove + #bloom for 📍 #DeHelling (SOLD OUT) 📷

Who will I see there?

Today I wrote a #WhiteRoomReviews item about #rottensound 💿 #seasonofmist

Go check it out on WR 🫶

Beanie from this fit is from #mercenary 🖤 #oktoberpromotion