Black Metal

For those who’ve lurked within the black metal underground for the past two decades (or even longer), the name MORRIGAN should be more than familiar. As Mayhemic Truth from 1992-2000, the band released a steady stream of demos that bowed before the ancient altar of the almighty Bathory. The shimmering darkness that Mayhemic Truth created back then was an untrendy counterpoint to black metal’s increasingly mainstream aspirations during that period, and also served as an oft-overlooked pillar of Germany’s black metal underground. However, when the band changed their moniker to MORRIGAN at the dawn of the new millennium and released their debut album, Plague, Waste and Death, in 2001, changes were afoot – and they were grand. For the rest of the ensuing decade, MORRIGAN moved on from Bathory’s more hard-charging style into the glorious “Viking era” marked most poignantly by the dual classics of Hammerheart and Twilight of the Gods. Their exploration of Quorthon’s pagan ruminations soon became an almost parallel realm of unrecorded Viking Bathory work, both sincerely devoted to those twin tomes and simultaneously expanding upon them, the latter largely through the exploration of Celtic mythology. In short, this was the true sound of MORRIGAN, and they quietly led others into new-yet-old pagan vastlands.

Black Metal

RUTTOKOSMOS are one of the great “what if?”s of Finnish black metal. The band formed sometime in 2003 and released the five-song Ja minä näin kuoleman demo in 2006 and then the six-song Kärsimys demo a year later. Afterward, nothing was heard from RUTTOKOSMOS ever again. Only one member concurrently played in Divina Inferis, and the other two members either disappeared and played pseudonymously in other bands.

Black Metal

Second release on EP. With Satanic Warmaster, White Death or Gestapo 666 members as exemple.

Vinyl 7″ EP. Includes a hand-numbered single-sided insert on red-paper. Limited to 666 copies.

Black Metal

And so the battle continues with Aamongandr, SATANIC WARMASTER’s first studio full-length since 2014’s acclaimed Fimbulwinter. Indeed, where that album evinced a diversity of songcraft and, more so, a concertedly polished aspect that majestically made that obsidian gleam, Aamongandr explores that duality with equally compelling results. In fact, with the album wasting no time in kicking into high gear, SATANIC WARMASTER sounds more urgent than ever – and yet, here is where the band’s epic side is also revealed in full. Cryogenic and caressing is its melodicism, in the glare of burning churches, and deftly dusted with subtle synths that heighten the mysticism at the heart of the SW sound, Aamongandr’s six songs charge forth with the grim grandiosity of mighty steeds; not for nothing is one of the album’s highlights titled “Duke’s Ride (Ride of the Spectral Hooves).” All told, this sixth long-form statement of intent is immediately recognizable as SATANIC WARMASTER but irrevocably proves that its creator’s imagination continues to flow as infinitely as the Atlantean depths.