Nephila – Huldra (Majestic Mountain Records) [Rick Eaglestone]
Nephila are a band that treats the 1970s not as a museum piece but as a doorway.
Formed in Arvika, deep in the Värmland forests, back in 2017, the masked seven-piece made their name on a heady brew of vintage heavy rock, psych and space-rock strut – two women trading vocal lines over a pair of guitars and a churning organ.
Their self-titled 2021 debut did well enough to land a P3 Guld nomination and now Five years on, Huldra arrives as the follow-up, and it is a markedly darker, stranger beast.
Huldra is a concept album, and a genuinely ambitious one. It takes its cue from the skogsrå – the Hulda of Nordic folklore, the forest spirit who lures wanderers off the path with a lovely face and, depending on which telling you believe, a hollow back or a cow’s tail hidden under her skirts.
Nephila run each of the record’s nine tracks as another chapter in her story, but the clever move is what they make her stand for.
In the band’s reading she is less a monster than a mirror: a figure for every woman ever feared or hounded for the sin of belonging to only herself, for wanting independence, or power, or simply the freedom of the treeline over the tidy expectations of the village.
It is folklore pressed into service as something pointedly modern, myth as a way of talking about autonomy and about our nervous fascination with everything that lives beyond the fence.
The grooves that made the debut so moreish are still present and correct, but they have been dragged somewhere colder and heavier, the vintage warmth traded for something that broods.
It helps that Nephila are, frankly, a lot of band: two vocalists in Josephine Asker and newest recruit Linn Edlund, two guitarists in Hellenrud and Anton Athley, Charlie Andersson Vistbacka on bass, Johan Larsson’s organ fattening the middle and Johan Lööf driving the lot from the kit.
When they lean in, the result is a proper wall of sound; when they pull back, those two voices do genuinely eerie things in the gaps.
Anyone raised on Graveyard, Lucifer or Blues Pills will find plenty to grab hold of, though Huldra is a grimmer prospect than any of them. They spring from the same fertile Swedish retro-heavy seam as Graveyard and Witchcraft before them, but where a good deal of that scene is content to bask in warm analogue nostalgia, Nephila are actively trying to escape its gravity, and this, for the most part, is the sound of them managing it.
Mother Of The Woods opens the record, and reads as the album’s invocation, the summoning of the spirit before the story proper gets going. but a concept record this considered is unlikely to squander its first move on anything less than scene-setting, and I would expect it to lay out the ground rules: the groove, the gloom, and those two voices calling into the dark.
The title alone – mother, woods, the source from which the rest of the story flows – suggests an origin point, the record handing you its mythology before it starts complicating it.
In Her Hands is one of the more immediate things on offer, a rolling, insistent groove that wears its hooks on the outside. It’s the sort of track that lets you into the record before it starts asking the harder questions, and that parenthetical subtitle tells you plenty about where the album’s head is at: seduction and captivity, the Huldra’s two faces, folded straight into the chorus.
The Hidden Folk is where the folklore really takes hold, all creeping menace and close harmony, the two singers circling one another like something half-glimpsed between the trunks. It is a fine advert for what this incarnation of Nephila does that the old one didn’t – the retro swagger survives, but it has been iced over, and the effect is a good deal more unsettling for it.
Ash Their Bones promises the record’s nastiest turn – a bonfire of a track, if there’s any justice, and shrewdly placed at the album’s quarter mark to stop the mood settling into mere prettiness. On a record about what the forest does to those who wander in, a song named for burning bones is unlikely to be a lullaby.
Capercailles Hymn borrows its name from the capercaillie, the great booming forest grouse whose dawn courtship is one of the eeriest sounds in the Scandinavian woods, a nice bit of folklore-nerdery that suggests the band have done their reading.
Sight unheard, I would wager it for one of the album’s quieter, more ritual moments: the hush in the clearing before the back half turns dark again.
Huldra, the title track and lead video, is the thesis in miniature and the best possible shop window for the new sound. It sets the band’s old rolling groove against a guitar tone with real teeth and an atmosphere that slides from mystical to menacing and back, the two vocalists selling the spirit’s double nature – alluring one moment, predatory the next with impressive control.
If you want to know in four minutes whether this darker Nephila is for you, start here. It’s also, tellingly, the track they chose to lead with visually. The accompanying video leaning hard into the band’s mask-and-shadow theatre and doing a neat job of selling the album’s world before you’ve heard a second of the rest of it.
Solar Eclipse brings a wider, more cosmic sweep, the space-rock end of Nephila’s palette given room to drift before the pull of the earth (and the forest) hauls it back down. It’s a useful reminder that, for all the Nordic-folk framing, this is still a band with one boot planted firmly in the psychedelic cosmos.
Living Grave is the album’s psychological gut-punch and, for my money. Built on a lurching, dissociative groove, it dramatises the moment you catch your own reflection and find something else looking back – the self-coming quietly apart as the forest closes in around it.
The dual vocals are put to genuinely disquieting use here, one voice the person and the other the thing wearing their face, and the heavier, brooding direction pays off completely. If the rest of the record hits like this, Huldra is a triumph.
F.I.N.N closes the album, and it delivers a great ending to what have been overall some great storytelling.
Trading the easy warmth of retro heavy rock for something colder, weirder, and considerably more demanding has been gamble that appears to have paid off handsomely. There is a related danger in the atmosphere itself: lean too hard on gloom and cinematic sweep and you can end up admiring a record rather than loving it.
But the folklore-as-feminism reading hands Huldra a spine that a lesser concept album would lack, and a seven-piece with two voices this strong has more tools than most for keeping the thing alive across its full running time.
Coming from a band who could have played it safe and pointedly didn’t, Huldra shapes up as one of the more intriguing releases of the year a record that walks willingly into the dark and, on the strength of what I’ve heard, seems in no great hurry to come back out. 8/10
Fen – Elemental Part One: Mourning Earth (Prophecy Productions) [Matt Bladen]
Atmospheric black metal, post black metal, there’s a whole list of genre tags you could use for East Anglian band Fen but they’ve always been a band who are unafraid to shift their creative boundaries.
With seven previous albums behind them, the founding duo of The Watcher (vocals/guitar/synth) and Grungyn (bass/vocals) have been guiding the ever shifting extreme fringe metal of Fen since its creating in 2006. Since 2020 they’ve been joined by drummer JG and with Elemental Part One: Mourning Earth they seek to follow up the fantastic 2023 release Monuments To Absence.
It’s a record that sees them return to their roots, to the fens that they take their name from, mystical and mythical, they move away from the metallic intensity that was their last album allowing this one to breathe a lot more as they step back into the style they first emerged with, though with the knowledge of 20 years of what Fen should be.
Recorded live to allow it to undulate and evolve naturally, Mourninal Earth feels elemental, as if drawn from the world around it and conducted through this trio of creatives, it means that when things need to breathe they can as lucid atmospherics and clean moments of wonder taking in the sheer beauty of the landscape while benath it lies danger and a sense of dread created by the destructive black metal assault.
It’s a record where you can’t focus on individual phases, you have to take it all in as a whole joint the band on this sonic journey as they have intended, through nearly 47 minutes of magnificence. If you’re still hungry for more then the special edition features two more original tracks along with covers of W.A.S.P, The Cure and Crosby, Stills And Nash.
If the varied nature of the artist covered doesn’t tell you how versatile Fen are as a band then I don’t know what to say, just let Elemental Part One: Mourning Earth wash over you with it’s excellence, here’s hoping the next part isn’t too far away. 9/10
Miscreance – Reminiscence (Season Of Mist) [Mark Young]
Despite their protestations in the accompanying bio, there is a large debt to death amongst others within Miscreance’s sound, and I think its important to get that out of the way first. Protestations is probably too strong, but I liked it and have managed to shoehorn it into this review twice.
Their nod to the ‘classics’ is clear but that doesn’t mean that they just copy and approximate with no talent of their own. Trait d’Union starts in their own fashion, an introduction that is ill-fitting to an album of death metal until they remember what they should be doing and break out the technical rhythms in a way that confirms that there is so much more to them than just technical death metal.
There is a section here that owes more to Mastodon than anyone else, a mesmeric guitar line that comes in like a spider weaving an oversized web. It’s all familiar yet new, and personally if they are looking at amping up the classics then I’m all for it.
As the opener fades Vision drops in and they display more of that technical aggression. It follows a classic arrangement – fast riffs, then faster before they decide to turn things back on itself. Its not that they are playing fast and loose, its more that they just happen to know what works and what doesn’t.
Midway there’s a switch in vocal styles which adds a manic edge to proceedings instead of pole-axing any momentum built. Two tracks in and we are looking at a band that is on top of their game in terms of picking the right riff, the right drum pattern.
I appreciate that basing a review off the first two songs is a risky gambit, but there’s nothing to worry about with the songs that follow; Scalp Ceremony is a tight three minutes of focused bottom end riffs and melodic flourishes that concentrates on squeezing as much into this time as possible.
The lead break on Synaptic Cortex Dissection that flows into a riff break that reduces in bodily substance is something else. You expect them to wrap that break up by dropping into the heavy attack but nope, they go the other way. It’s that commitment to making these songs theirs that shines through.
For those who want to decry them as being a sound-a-like, knock yourself out. On the other hand if you want some top class technical death metal with a beating heart, then step on up. What they do is to skilfully mix hard edged guitar parts with melodic lines that spin around you.
Check the end of Oracle’s Rift for an example of this; a simple repetitive riff that allows them to break out the leads over the top of it. And bring bongos too.
If you consider that at some point, they have to have a lull, a point where a song doesn’t hit the relative heights of others on here, I mean you’d think that it’s a given. And you would be wrong.
The later songs do follow a certain template, and I suggest that this cannot be avoided due to the music they play; the urge to be able to throw those spidery rhythm lines so they can break out the leads must be undeniable.
The difference is that the material is strong, Zenith Of A Dying Sun shares that common DNA with Vision but is not a carbon copy of it. It’s a band where its component parts are firing in equal measures giving you a balanced and incredibly satisfying 37 minutes of technical freak out.
Of course, the final song has the ability to make or break things so obviously Mirage starts like it is on a mission, one that is devoted to a song that seems to wrap in on itself until its replaced by acoustic guitars playing a repeating measure.
And that is that. 9 songs that represent a high standard of technical death metal that have enough of an eye to the classics to know what very good sounds like whilst stamping their own manic energy on them. They are certainly one to look out for. 8/10
Korpse – Forbid (Unique Leader Records) [Spike]
Sometimes you don’t need a sprawling, hour-long concept record to get the point across. You just need three tracks of pure, concentrated hostility.
Dutch slam and brutal death metal veterans Korpse have had a rough ride over the past couple of years, weathering plenty of personal and band turmoil.
But instead of letting circumstances derail them, they’ve channelled every ounce of that frustration straight into the amplifiers. The result is Forbid, a short, merciless three-track EP released via Unique Leader that hits with genuine, weapons-grade anger.
The title track, Forbid, kicks down the door and sets the tone immediately with a spoken sample: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” That Martin Luther King Jr. quote nails the ethos of this release right to the wall.
It gives the track an immediate, sharp bite before Floor van Kuijk’s guitars and Marten van Kruijssen’s battering drums drop like an anvil. Sven van Dijk’s vocals remain utterly inhuman, a cavernous, guttural roar that doesn’t mask the lyrics behind studio tricks, but hurls them right into your face.
They keep the pressure relentless on Imminent Immolation. There’s no easing off the gas here; it’s a tight, suffocating display of slamming death metal that balances sheer velocity with bone-breaking half-time grooves.
Ante Zorić’s bass tone has a filthy, clattering presence in the bottom end that gives every slam section a physical, stomach-turning punch. It’s brutal, ugly, and played with the kind of laser focus that only comes from seasoned players who genuinely live and breathe this sound.
Then comes the curveball to close the EP: a cover of Lamb Of God’s Now You’ve Got Something To Die For. Taking an iconic, arena-sized modern groove metal anthem and running it through a death metal meat grinder is always a risky move, but Korpse completely make it their own.
They strip away any lingering radio sheen, slowing the main riff down into a sickening, concrete-heavy stomp and replacing Blythe’s rasp with Sven’s subterranean growl. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it ends up sounding like a natural extension of their own scorched-earth catalogue.
Clocking in at just under ten minutes, Forbid doesn’t give you time to get comfortable. It’s a furious, cathartic purge from a band refusing to stay down, and it feels absolutely awesome to listen to.
If this is where Korpse are heading after surviving their recent hurdles, the next full-length is going to be terrifying. 9/10
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