Artist: Blut Aud Nord
Title: Ethereal Horizons
Type: Album
Label: Debmur Morti Productions
I am pretty much on to a hiding for nothing reviewing this: Huge release for big name band that everyone and their dog and cat have probably reviewed (cat reviews are the best btw) Ahem. But this blog is my own and is here to celebrate music I love and this…. this is the real deal. But I will try at least to put it into context with the usual items I review.
I need to say I have a spotty and odd history with the French Avant-garde black metal legends. I was not a huge fan of their first two or three albums to be honest but, like most of the extreme metal world went “W the actual F…?” when the landmark, monolithic album ‘The Work Which Transforms God’ was released. Also being a fan of The Axis Of Perdition way of terrorizing people, the EP ‘Thematic Emancipation Of Archetypal Multiplicity’ originally scheduled for a spilt with The Axis, rather impressed me. But nothing truly prepared me for the utter annihilation that was the masterpiece/horror/rubbish ‘MoRT'(take your pick, you’ll find me in the ‘masterpiece’ corner) which in retrospect even the band dislike as ‘going too far’.
The back-pedalling and slight swerve around that branch of music left me a little lost to be honest, with Odinist being a shadow of the band in comparison for me (but frankly very few others) and after Memoria Vetusta II I drifted way. That’s a huge period of absence from the band and, of course, now with ‘Ethereal Horizons’ in my hands I am probably due a backtrack and even a lot of humble pie on the menu.
For this. THIS is just…. immaculate.
‘Shadows Breathe First’ absolutely opens the doors of this cosmic world, a smooth piano passage, gradually suggesting a careful step into the void before the huge riff and blast hurls us into space. This melody is huge with the keyboards, the harsh vocals the teeth of the guardian to this place…. but oh when the clean vocals come in, a strange synth/goth feel to them your body may be here still but you soul is on another journey entirely. The power, the epic nature, the arrangement and the utterly beautiful sonic slipstream this creates is utterly mesmeric. Imagine Arcturus without the baroque bombast but all the kinetic power. It is progressive in the best sense; swirls of notes and shifts in tempo and style and always pulled back into the slipstream. Somehow this remains with a soul touched by black metal but its spiritual path is light years into the cosmos. Fast but graceful, smooth but never slick. Uplifting and made of blinding light.
‘Seclusion’ begins in quiet but bursts into that Blut Aus Nord ‘not-quite-industrial’ beat and sound and another mesmerising melody lifts it up and we are high above something we cannot describe with any other world than glory. Again the sense of light is everywhere in a tidal pulse, but with such power that awe and more than a touch of fear grips you. ‘The Ordeal’ as the title implies has a curve into a darker place, but the clean vocals, powerful and haunting, never let you drown, remind you that this is something to overcome. This is black metal that fans of space/psyche would understand.
‘The Fall Opens The Sky’ leaves me speechless. An intense current, a howl of black metal in a surging river of power speeding through realms unknown. It is like being the astral body flung far beyond the real and the horror and beauty, the chaos and power and majesty of what is out there is heartbreaking. Soulbreaking.
Oh look, my friends, I could step through each journey and passage here but… if any album I have heard in the last decade is a voyage of discover that a review should leave great parts unspoken for the listen to discover, this is the one. This is THE one. Let it become your own journey not mine.
The power and brilliance, both in talent and in the sense of dizzying, disorienting light that the music brings is beyond compare. It is a work of beauty and awe; where something so perfect appears before you that the being bring abject terror. It is layers of mystery to the final moments of the epic heart crushing closer ‘The End Becomes Grace’, it sweeps them back like light made silk and reveals nothing but a deeper world, a more distant void. And it is always the powerful pull of a journey through these places.
Ethereal Horizons is an album of terrifying, imposing grace. It is a journey. It is a majestic blend of the semi industrial, the graceful progressive and of electronica and ambience. And yet it also surges forward, relentless and restless, on the current of the riff and the primal rage of black metal. I love gnarly, lo-fi, no-fi black metal. I love the sweetness of simple dungeon synth and yet I see no reason why that doesn’t feed into my overwhelming emotional response to this album because it feels passionate. It is driven. It wants to hold you and show you places you have never traversed even in your dreams.
Powerful, overwhelming, primal and terrible beauty suffused with light and of the other. This is a monolith. This is Blut Aus Nord shattering their last remaining shackles and thundering free to storm the void.
Album of 2025. From nowhere.This is what I live for.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 