Band:	Det Eviga Leendet
Album:	Reverence
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	January 2022

01. Bloom
02. Visage
03. Retch
04. Estrange
05. Regret
06. Yield

Eternity must be a very long time to keep a smile.

In Pär Lagerkvist's 1920 novel, Det eviga leendet (The Eternal Smile), dead people tell stories to pass the time, and by time I mean, eternity. How many stories would fit? All of them and then some. I haven't read the novel yet, but I know that more than 90 years later, some Swedes were moved enough by it that they decided to name their band after it. Det Eviga Leendet are still a pretty mysterious collective, which should probably explain why their debut, 2018's Lenience, was released through the now defunct and equally mysterious Fallen Empire Records. Four years later, Det Eviga Leendet join the Mystískaos, sport out an equally striking cover art, and sharpen their sound.

And I probably would have missed this album if not for the Mystískaos connection, since they're a collective I've been following even since one of our writers had shared a strong affinity for it, but it's Johan G Winther's cover art that really sold it to me. It felt like it tapped into an artistic history that black metal doesn't recognize enough, which is a feeling I was hoping to get from the music as well. Black metal has been around for a pretty long time and has been evolving quite sporadically ever since its inception, and a lot of the Mystískaos bands were one of the reason why it felt like black metal's evolution was a living process that was happening right then. Years later, it's hard to recapture the same spine tingling feeling, and part of it is certainly the oversaturation of music that happens when you're trying to keep up with so many releases, but also because it's hard to figure out where else is there for black metal to go.

Calling Reverence unoriginal would be pretty absurd, because a lot of what I feel here does have a bit of distinctiveness, but most of the time I am more impressed by how well it is performed rather than that it actually does. This is black metal with an atmospheric edge, but where the atmosphere stems more from how impactful the melodies are rather than some hypnotic ambiance. A lot of Reverence's viciousness stems from the vocals, performed here by Mare Cognitum's Jacob Buczarski, so it must feel pretty weird that I like his performance here more than on the more overtly atmospheric Mare Cognitum. The riffing feels like an icy blizzard, the synths never feel overbearing or gimmicky, and it's dynamic sense of melodies doesn't degrade with further listens.

Calling things "solid" may have lost its meaning, making it sound like a nicer way to say "serviceable". I find it hard to really connect and be blown away by Reverence, but when I say that it's really solid black metal, I mean it.